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The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 


THE    WORKS   OF 

SAMUEL    BUTLER 

The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler,  Author  of 
"Erewhon."  Selections  arranged  and  edited  by 
HENRY  FESTING  JONES.  New  Edition,  with  an 
Introduction  by  FRANCIS  HACKETT,  and  a  por- 
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E.    P.    BUTTON    &    CO. 

NEW    YORK 


SAMUEL  BUTLER  IN  1898 

FROM    A    PAINTING    BY    EMERY    WALKER 


The  Note-Books  of 
Samuel  Butler 

Author  of  "Erewhon" 


Selections  arranged  and  edited  by 

Henry  Festing  Jones 

With  an  Introduction  by 

Francis  Hackett 


NEW  YORK 
E.  P.  DUTTON  &  CO. 

681  FIFTH  AVENUE 


PUBLISHED,  1917, 
BY  E.  P.  DUTTON  &  CO. 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


Introductory 


In  "The  Doctor's  Dilemma"  there  is  a  saucy  reference  to 
an  unprofessional  heretic  who  has  views  on  art,  science, 
morals  and  religion.  Old  Sir  Patrick  Cullen  shocks  the 
heretic's  disciple  by  not  even  recognizing  the  name.  "Bernard 
Shaw  ?"  he  ponders,  "I  never  heard  of  him.  He's  a  Methodist 
preacher,  I  suppose."  Louis  is  horrified.  "No,  no.  He's 
the  most  advanced  man  now  living:  he  isn't  anything."  The 
old  doctor  is  not  set  back  an  inch.  These  "advanced"  men 
who  impress  the  young  by  employing  the  accumulations  of 
genius — he  knows  them.  "I  assure  you,  young  man,"  he  in- 
forms Louis,  "my  father  learnt  the  doctrine  of  deliverance 
from  sin  from  John  Wesley's  own  lips  before  you  or  Mr. 
Shaw  were  born." 

It  is  a  pleasant  thing  to  claim  that  the  man  you  admire  is 
"advanced"  and  to  believe  serenely  that  you  are  progressive 
along  with  him.  It  is  also  a  convenient  thing  to  employ  such 
question-begging  phrases  as  heterodox,  radical,  free-thinker, 
anarchist.  The  trouble  with  such  phrases,  indicative  and  ex- 
citing ac  they  are,  is  their  plain  relativity  to  something  repre- 
hensible that  only  you  yourself  have  in  mind.  The  world  is 
full  of  moss-grown  places  called  Newtown  and  Newburg  and 
Nykobing  and  Neuville.  It  is  also  full  of  moss-grown  writ- 
ers who  once  were  advanced  and  revolutionary.  If  a  writer 
is  to  be  paraded  as  heterodox  it  has  to  be  shown  that  he  does 
something  more  than  take  up  an  agreeable  position.  It  has 
to  be  shown  that  he  has  a  manner,  a  method,  of  dealing  with 
things  that  really  deserve  to  be  considered  advanced. 

This  is  Samuel  Butler's  claim  on  posterity.  The  urgently 
intelligent  son  of  a  dull  English  clergyman,  he  certainly  did 
not  lack  incentives  to  heterodoxy.  Besides  that  he  was  born 
in  1835  and  was  one  of  the  first  of  Darwin's  admirers,  as 
later  he  was  one  of  the  first  of  his  critics.  But  there  was 
more  than  reflex  action  in  Samuel  Butler's  heterodoxy.  He 


iv  Introductory 

was  never  anything  so  regular  as  an  anarchist.  He  dis- 
trusted authority  in  religion  and  art  and  science  without  dis- 
carding religious,  artistic  or  scientific  values.  He  thought 
freely  without  being  a  freethinker,  and  radically  without  be- 
ing a  radical.  To  say  he  was  lawless  would  entirely  misrepre- 
sent him,  he  was  not  nearly  so  much  a  revolutionary  as  a 
conscientious  objector  on  the  loose.  Here  again  he  fell  into 
none  of  the  ordinary  classifications.  He  was  not  a  mission- 
ary. He  had  as  little  ambition  to  form  a  new  orthodoxy  as 
to  attach  himself  to  an  old  one.  He  had  a  marked  propensity, 
that  of  thinking  for  himself — one  of  those  perplexing  pro- 
pensities that  nothing  seems  to  determine,  that  may  occur  in 
an  emperor  or  his  slave  and  no  one  know  how  or  why.  And 
that  propensity,  the  capital  distinction  of  his  many-sided  life, 
gave  him  emancipation  in  a  way  that  no  one  could  have  pre- 
dicted and  that  was  long  quite  difficult  to  label. 

It  was  difficult  to  label  mainly  because  Samuel  Butler's  in- 
tellectual adventure  had  come  to  an  end  before  the  label  was 
invented.  Samuel  Butler  was  above  everything  a  pragmatist, 
one  of  those  forerunners  of  pragmatism  who  did  not  become 
conscious  of  its  "universal  mission"  or  its  "conquering  des- 
tiny," who  nevertheless  employed  the  method  intuitively  and 
"made  momentous  contributions  to  truth  by  its  means."  It 
is  tragic,  in  many  ways,  that  Butler  had  not  the  benefit  of  the 
formulation  of  pragmatism.  Had  he  possessed  it,  however, 
he  could  not  have  been  more  closely,  more  consistently,  its 
exponent.  "Pragmatism,"  said  William  James  in  1907,  "rep- 
resents a  perfectly  familiar  attitude  in  philosophy,  the  em- 
piricist attitude,  but  it  represents  it,  as  it  seems  to  me,  both 
in  a  more  radical  and  in  a  less  objectionable  form  than  it  has 
ever  yet  assumed.  A  pragmatist  turns  his  back  resolutely 
and  once  for  all  upon  a  lot  of  inveterate  habits  dear  to  pro- 
fessional philosophers.  He  turns  away  from  abstraction  and 
insufficiency,  from  verbal  solutions,  from  bad  a  priori  rea- 
sons, from  fixed  principles,  closed  systems,  and  pretended 
absolutes  and  origins.  He  turns  towards  concreteness  and 
adequacy,  towards  facts,  towards  action  and  towards  power. 
That  means  the  empiricist  temper  regnant  and  the  rationalist 
temper  sincerely  given  up.  It  means  the  open  air  and  possi- 
bilities of  nature,  as  against  dogma,  artificiality,  and  the  pre- 
tence of  the  finality  of  truth."  This  was  the  attitude  Samuel 


Introductory  v 

Butler  achieved  for  himself  and  the  one  which  these  Note- 
Books  so  fully  and  singularly  exemplify. 

There  is  a  kind  of  man  whose  sensations  come  at  the  dou- 
ble, who  must  take  them  down  as  they  fly  by  or  lose  them 
eternally.  Butler's  Note-Books  were  not  kept  for  such  a 
purpose.  It  was  not  his  senses  that  were  imperious  for  a 
scribe :  it  was  his  ruminations,  his  ideas.  He  was  painter  and 
musician  as  well  as  writer,  and  he  was  writer  in  the  most 
general  interpretation,  but  his  chief  characteristic  was  not, 
so  to  speak,  sensuous  impressionability.  It  was  an  incessant 
intellectual  activity.  He  had  "the  principle  of  stopping  every- 
where and  anywhere  to  put  down  his  notes,  as  the  true  painter 
will  stop  anywhere  and  everywhere  to  sketch,"  but  the  notes 
were  not  wild  or  woodland,  they  were  memoranda  in  his  end- 
less discovery  of  wisdom.  Occasionally  the  spectacle  of  the 
world  urged  him  to  record  emotion,  and  he  observes  that  from 
the  age  of  twelve  the  music  of  his  well-beloved  Handel  was 
never  a  day  out  of  his  head.  But  it  was  the  opinions  and 
ideas  he  derived  from  experience  that  stirred  him  to  write  in 
his  Note-Books.  Experience  did  not  so  much  enamor  him  as 
stimulate  his  mind. 

The  vivacity  of  Samuel  Butler's  mind  is  astonishing.  He 
was  not  brilliant  in  the  sense  that  his  expression  was  daz- 
zling. Dazzling  writers  like  George  Meredith  were  distaste- 
ful to  him,  and  he  felt  little  of  their  need  to  give  acuity  to  the 
words  that  were  to  convey  poignant  experiences.  Neither  did 
he  wish  to  incite  passion  or  ecstasy.  He  held  everything,  even 
his  God,  at  arm's  length,  and  the  light  by  which  he  examined 
his  world  was  daylight.  Because  of  his  sharp  curiosity,  how- 
ever, his  independence  and  audacity  and  humorous  scepti- 
cism, he  achieved  that  kind  of  penetrativeness  which  is  often 
called  brilliant.  Penetrative  he  was  to  an  extraordinary  de- 
gree and  over  an  area  that  few  men  of  his  time  even  dreamed 
of  encompassing.  He  was  dry  on  occasion  and  on  occasion 
captious,  but  he  never  said  a  heartless  thing  or  a  foolish.  And 
from  the  first  line  he  wrote  to  the  last  there  is  not  a  single 
dishonest  utterance.  Almost  every  one  who  writes  is  tempted 
now  and  then  to  say  something  which  is  not  quite  authentic, 
to  use  a  hackneyed  phrase  if  not  a  hackneyed  thought. 
Samuel  Butler  authenticated  everything  he  uttered.  During 
his  growing  years  and  indeed  all  through  his  life  he  found 


vi  Introductory 

himself  brushed  aside  by  the  pundits.  From  pretentiousness 
he  suffered  as  only  a  modest  man  can  suffer,  and  he  abhorred 
it.  One  result  of  it  was  to  accentuate  his  own  priestlessness 
and  simplicity.  He  could  easily  have  got  himself  up  as  an 
authority.  It  is  a  thing  that  almost  any  busybody  with  a 
plodding  secretary  can  accomplish.  Butler  leaned  over  back- 
wards to  avoid  doing  it.  He  even  went  so  far  as  to  suspect 
everything  that  had  the  air  of  being  professional,  and  to  take 
a  perverse  pleasure  in  offering  to  machine-made  scholars  his 
own  hand-made  heterodox  views.  And  not  only  were  his 
views  pragmatically  decided,  so  were  the  bases  on  which  he 
formed  them.  It  is  significant  that  though  he  was  born  in 
1835  and  lived  to  1902  he  got  more  out  of  Handel  in  music  and 
Bellini  in  painting  than  out  of  any  other  masters.  Homer 
and  Shakespeare  happened  to  interest  him,  but  he  paid  no 
attention  whatever  to  those  "imaginary  obligations"  of  an 
academic  or  journalistic  order  which  keep  most  people  from 
discovering  what  they  really  value.  Tolstoy  and  Ibsen,  Mor- 
ris and  Karl  Marx,  were  Butler's  contemporaries.  They 
might  as  well  have  lived  in  Kamchatka  for  any  chance  they 
had  of  crossing  the  threshold  of  his  hospitable  but  resolutely 
unfashionable  mind. 

Between  the  cravings  of  gregariousness  and  the  exactions 
of  his  critical  intelligence,  then,  Butler  was  never  at  a  loss  to 
decide.  But  this  severance  from  the  crowd  was  not  without 
an  emotional  result.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  he  suffered 
some  of  the  penalties  of  being  an  intellectual  anchorite. 
From  the  egoistic  rigidity  that  may  so  easily  be  the  outcome 
of  isolation — if  not  its  promoter — he  was  preserved  by  com- 
mon sense.  Though  he  embraced  the  most  difficult  of  ex- 
periments, the  experiment  of  true  independence,  he  kept  on 
the  right  side  of  the  thin  partition  mainly  through  avoiding 
the  mistakes  of  that  early  ancestor  who  imagined  God  as 
solemn  because  "he  was  impressed  with  an  undue  sense  of  his 
own  importance  and,  as  a  natural  consequence,  he  had  no 
sense  ot  humor."  In  spite  of  extreme  common  sense  and 
humor,  the  price  of  being  heterodox  told  on  Butler.  He  was 
much  too  spirited  to  lament  his  exile,  but  sometimes  he  was 
cross-grained  and  spiritually  dyspeptic.  H^s  dislike  of  Bee- 
thoven, Leonardo  and  Goethe  was  not  mere  buoyant  uncon- 
ventionality  or  admirable  aesthetic  sabotage.  It  had  a  slightly 


Introductory  vii 

diseased  contrariness.  He  was  wonderfully  outspoken  about 
his  own  neglect  and  comparative  failure,  and  exceedingly  can- 
did about  his  aspirations  for  fame,  but  all  this  could  not  pre- 
vent his  being  estranged  from  certain  great  men  by  very  rea- 
son of  their  general  acceptance.  Those  who  are  themselves 
frustrated  cannot  help  the  impulse  to  frustrate  others,  and 
the  fact  that  his  unaffected  opinions  were  not  fairly  received 
sometimes  gave  Butler  an  animus  in  challenging  opinions  that 
were. 

Unsparing  pragmatism,  however,  kept  him  from  being  a 
crank  and  made  him  a  priceless  critic  of  what  H.  G.  Wells 
calls  "first  and  last  things."  And  the  freshest  of  his  dis- 
criminations, the  most  unexpected  and  the  most  unqualified, 
are  to  be  found  in  his  Note-Books.  It  is  a  common  thing  in 
life  to  hear  some  one  bemoaning  a  talker  whose  music  died 
in  him.  Here  is  a  wise  and  humorous  and  varied  man  who 
preserved  his  observations  as  they  sprang  from  him.  It  is 
monologue,  it  is  true,  rather  deliberate  and  reasoned  mono- 
logue editorially  cut-and-dried.  The  fact  remains  that  it  is 
the  essential  Samuel  Butler  in  his  normal  habit  of  mind. 
Under  compulsion  to  think  for  himself,  his  Note-Books  de- 
tect him  in  the  process,  and  so  represent  the  range  and  depth 
of  his  genius.  That  it  was  genius,  though  often  blue  in  the 
cold  of  his  era,  there  is  no  questioning.  And  it  is  peculiarly 
precious  because  it  is  liberating.  It  cannot  but  open  the  doors 
for  those  who  have  felt  orthodoxies  stifle  them  in  their  own 
attempt  to  think  for  themselves. 

FRANCIS  BYRNE  HACKETT. 


Preface  to  the  Original  Edition 

£ARLY  in  his  life  Samuel  Butler  began  to  carry  a  note- 
book and  to  write  down  in  it  anything  he  wanted  to 
remember;  it  might  be  something  he  heard  some  one  say,  more 
commonly  it  was  something  he  said  himself.  In  one  of  these 
notes  he  gives  a  reason  for  making  them: 

"One's  thoughts  fly  so  fast  that  one  must  shoot  them;  it  is 
no  use  trying  to  put  salt  on  their  tails." 

So  he  bagged  as  many  as  he  could  hit  and  preserved  them, 
re-written  on  loose  sheets  of  paper  which  constituted  a  sort  of 
museum  stored  with  the  wise,  beautiful,  and  strange  creatures 
that  were  continually  winging  their  way  across  the  Held  of  his 
vision.  As  he  became  a  more  expert  marksman  his  collection 
increased  and  his  museum  grew  so  crowded  that  he  wanted  a 
catalogue.  In  1874  he  started  an  index,  and  this  led  to  his  re- 
considering the  notes,  destroying  those  that  he  remembered 
having  used  in  his  published  books  and  re-writing  the  remain- 
der. The  re-writing  shortened  some  but  it  lengthened  others 
and  suggested  so  many  new  ones  that  the  index  wa>s  soon  of  lit- 
tle use  and  there  seemed  to  be  no  finality  about  it  ("Making 
Notes,"  pp.  100-1  post) .  In  1891  he  attacked  the  problem  afresh 
and  made  it  a  rule  to  spend  an  hour  every  morning  re-editing 
his  notes  and  keeping  his  index  up  to  date.  At  his  death,  in 
1902,  he  left  five  bound  volumes,  with  the  contents  dated  and 
indexed,  about  225  pages  of  closely  written  sermon  paper  to 
each  volume,  and  more  than  enough  unbound  and  unindexed 
sheets  to  make  a  sixth  volume  of  equal  size. 

In  accordance  with  his  own  advice  to  a  young  writer  (p.  363 
post},  he  wrote  the  notes  in  copying  ink  and  kept  a  pressed 
copy  with  me  as  a  precaution  against  fire;  but  during  his  life- 
time, unless  he  wanted  to  refer  to  something  while  he  was  in  my 
chambers,  I  never  looked  at  them.  After  his  death  I  took  them 
doivn  and  went  through  them.  I  knew  in  a  general  way  what  I 
should  find,  but  I  was  not  prepared  for  such  a  multitude  and 


x         Preface  to  the  Original  Edition 

•variety  of  thoughts,  reflections,  conversations,  incidents.  There 
are  entries  about  his  early  life  at  Langar,  Handel,  school  days 
at  Shrewsbury,  Cambridge,  Christianity,  literature,  New  Zea- 
land, sheep-farming,  philosophy,  painting,  money,  evolution, 
morality,  Italy,  speculation,  photography,  music,  natural  his- 
tory, archaeology,  botany,  religion,  book-keeping,  psychology, 
metaphysics,  the  Iliad,  the  Odyssey,  Sicily,  architecture,  ethics, 
the  Sonnets  of  Shakespeare.  I  thought  of  publishing  the 
books  just  as  they  stand,  but  too  many  of  the  entries  are  of  no 
general  interest  and  too  many  are  of  a  kind  that  must  wait  if 
they  are  ever  to  be  published.  In  addition  to  these  objections 
the  confusion  is  very  great.  One  would  look  in  the  earlier  vol- 
umes for  entries  about  New  Zealand  and  evolution  and  in  the 
later  ones  for  entries  about  the  Odyssey  and  the  Sonnets,  but 
there  is  no  attempt  at  arrangement  and  anywhere  one  may  come 
upon  something  about  Handel,  or  a  philosophical  reflection,  be- 
tween a  note  giving  the  name  of  the  best  hotel  in  an  Italian  town 
and  another  about  Harry  Nicholls  and  Herbert  Campbell  as  the 
Babes  in  the  Wood  in  the  pantomime  at  the  Grecian  Theatre. 
This  confusion  has  a  charm,  but  it  is  a  charm  that  would  not,  I 
fear,  survive  in  print  and,  personally,  I  find  that  it  makes  the 
books  distracting  for  continuous  reading.  Moreover  they  were 
not  intended  to  be  published  as  they  stand  ("Preface  to  Vol. 
II,"  p.  215  post ) ,  they  were  intended  for  his  own  private  use  as 
a  quarry  from  which  to  take  material  for  his  writing,  and  it  is 
remarkable  that  in  practice  he  scarcely  ever  used  them  in  this 
way  ("These  Notes,"  p.  261  post}.  When  he  had  written  and 
re-written  a  note  and  spoken  it  and  repeated  it  in  conversation, 
it  became  so  much  a  part  of  him  that,  if  he  wanted  to  introduce 
it  in  a  book,  it  was  less  trouble  to  re-state  it  again  from  memory 
than  to  search  through  his  "precious  indexes"  for  it  and  copy  it 
("Gadshill and  Trapani,"  p.  194,  "At  Piora,"  p.  272  post}.  But 
he  could  not  have  re-stated  a  note  from  memory  if  he  had  not 
learnt  it  by  writing  it,  so  that  it  may  be  said  that  he  did  use 
the  notes  for  his  books,  though  not  precisely  in  the  way  he  orig- 
inally intended.  And  the  constant  re-writing  and  re-consider- 
ing were  useful  also  by  forcing  him  to  settle  exactly  what  he 
thought  and  to  state  it  as  clearly  and  tersely  as  possible.  In  this 
way  the  making  of  the  notes  must  have  had  an  influence  on  the 
formation  of  his  style — though  here  again  he  had  no  such  idea 
in  his  mind  when  writing  them  ("Style,"  pp.  186-7  post}. 


Preface  to  the  Original  Edition        xi 

In  one  of  the  notes  he  says: 

"A  man  may  make,  as  it  were,  cash  entries  of  himself  in  a 
day-book,  but  the  entries  in  the  ledger  and  the  balancing  of  the 
accounts  should  be  done  by  others." 

When  I  began  to  write  the  Memoir  of  Butler  on  which  I 
am  still  engaged,  I  marked  all  the  more  autobiographical  notes 
and  had  them  copied;  again  I  was  struck  by  the  interest,  the 
•variety,  and  the  confusion  of  those  I  left  untouched.  It  seemed 
to  me  that  any  one  who  undertook  to  become  Butler's  account- 
ant and  to  post  his  entries  upon  himself  would  have  to  settle 
•first  how  many  and  what  accounts  to  open  in  the  ledger, and  this 
could  not  be  done  until  it  had  been  settled  which  items  were  to 
be  selected  for  posting.  It  was  the  difficulty  of  those  who  dare 
not  go  into  the  water  until  after  they  have  learnt  to  swim.  I 
doubt  whether  I  should  ever  have  made  the  plunge  if  it  had  not 
been  for  the  interest  which  Mr.  Desmond  MacCarthy  took  in 
Butler  and  his  writings.  He  had  occasionally  browsed  on  my 
copy  of  the  books,  and  when  he  became  editor  of  a  review,  the 
New  Quarterly,  he  asked  for  some  of  the  notes  for  publication, 
thus  providing  a  practical  and  simple  way  of  entering  upon  the 
business  without  any  very  alarming  plunge.  I  talked  his  pro- 
posal over  with  Mr.  R.  A.  Streatfeild,  Butler's  literary  execu- 
tor, and,  having  obtained  his  approval,  set  to  work.  From  No- 
vember 1907  to  May  1910,  inclusive,  the  New  Quarterly  pub- 
lished six  groups  of  notes  and  the  long  note  on  "Genius"  (pp. 
174-8  post}.  The  experience  gained  in  selecting,  arranging, 
and  editing  these  items  has  been  of  great  use  to  me  and  I  thank 
the  proprietor  and  editor  of  the  New  Quarterly  for  permission 
to  republish  such  of  the  notes  as  appeared  in  their  review. 

In  preparing  this  book  I  began  by  going  through  the  notes 
again  and  marking  all  that  seemed  to  fall  within  certain  groups 
roughly  indicated  by  the  arrangement  in  the  review.  I  had 
these  selected  items  copied,  distributed  them  among  those  which 
were  already  in  print,  shuffled  them  and  turned  them  over, 
meditating  on  them,  familiarising  myself  with  them  and  tenta- 
tively forming  new  groups.  While  doing  this  I  was  continually 
gleaning  from  the  books  more  notes  which  I  had  overlooked, 
and  making  such  verbal  alterations  as  seemed  necessary  to 
avoid  repetition,  to  correct  obvious  errors  and  to  remove  causes 
of  reasonable  offence.  The  ease  with  which  two  or  more  notes 
would  condense  into  one  was  sometimes  surprising,  but  there 


xii      Preface  to  the  Original  Edition 

were  cases  in  which  the  language  had  to  be  varied  and  others  in 
which  a  few  words  had  to  be  added  to  bridge  over  a  gap;  as  a 
rule,  however,  the  necessary  words  were  lying  ready  in  some 
other  note.  I  also  reconsidered  the  titles  and  provided  titles  for 
many  notes  which  had  none.  In  making  these  verbal  alter- 
ations I  bore  in  'mind  Butler's  own  views  on  the  subject  which 
I  found  in  a  note  about  editing  letters: 

"Granted  that  an  editor,  like  a  translator,  should  keep  as 
religiously  close  to  the  original  text  as  he  reasonably  can,  and, 
in  every  alteration,  should  consider  what  the  writer  would  have 
wished  and  done  if  he  or  she  could  have  been  consulted,  yet, 
subject  to  these  limitations,  he  should  be  free  to  alter  accord- 
ing to  his  discretion  or  indiscretion." 

My  "discretion  or  indiscretion"  was  less  seriously  strained 
in  making  textual  changes  than  in  determining  how  many,  and 
what,  groups  to  have  and  which  notes,  in  what  order,  to  include 
in  each  group.  Here  is  a  note  Butler  made  about  classification : 

"Fighting  about  words  is  like  fighting  about  accounts,  and  all 
classification  is  like  accounts.  Sometimes  it  is  easy  to  see  which 
way  the  balance  of  convenience  lies,  sometimes  it  is  very  hard 
to  know  whether  an  item  should  be  carried  to  one  account  or 
to  another." 

Except  in  the  group  headed  "Higgledy-Piggledy"  I  have 
endeavoured  to  post  each  note  to  a  suitable  account,  but  some 
of  Butler's  leading  ideas,  expressed  in  different  farms,  will 
be  found  posted  to  more  than  one  account,  and  this  kind  of 
repetition  is  in  accordance  with  his  habit  in  conversation.  It 
would  probably  be  correct  to  say  that  I  have  heard  him  speak 
the  substance  of  every  note  many  times  in  different  contexts. 
In  seeking  for  the  most  characteristic  context,  I  have  shifted 
and  shifted  the  notes  and  considered  and  re-considered  them 
under  different  aspects,  taking  hints  from  the  delicate  chame- 
leon changes  of  significance  that  came  over  them  as  they  har- 
monised or  discorded  with  their  new  surroundings.  Presently 
I  caught  myself  restoring  notes  to  positions  they  had  previously 
occupied  instead  of  finding  new  places  for  them,  and  the  in- 
creasing frequency  with  which  difficulties  were  solved  by  these 
restorations  at  last  forced  me  to  the  conclusion,  which  I  accept- 
ed only  with  very  great  regret,  that  my  labours  were  at  an  end. 

I  do  not  expect  every  one  to  approve  of  the  result.  If  I  had 
been  trying  to  please  every  one,  I  should  have  made  only  a  very 


Preface  to  the  Original  Edition     xiii 

short  and  unrepresentative  selection  which  Mr.  Fifield  would 
have  refused  to  publish.  I  have  tried  to  make  such  a  book  as  I 
believe  would  have  pleased  Butler.  That  is  to  say,  I  have  tried 
to  please  one  who,  by  reason  of  his  intimate  knowledge  of  the 
subject  and  of  the  difficulties,  would  have  looked  with  indul- 
gence upon  the  many  mistakes  which  it  is  now  too  late  to  cor- 
rect, even  if  I  knew  how  to  correct  them,.  Had  it  been  possible 
for  him  to  see  what  I  have  done,  he  would  have  detected  all  my 
sim,  both  of  omission  and  of  commission,  and  I  like  to  imagine 
that  he  would  have  used  some  such  consoling  words  as  these: 
"Well,  never  mind;  one  cannot  have  everything;  and,  after  all, 
'Le  mieux  est  I'ennemi  du  bien.' '' 

Here  will  be  found  much  of  what  he  used  to  say  as  he  talked 
with  one  or  two  intimate  friends  in  his  own  chambers  or  in 
mine  at  the  close  of  the  day,  or  on  a  Sunday  walk  in  the  coun- 
try round  London,  or  as  we  wandered  together  through  Italy 
and  Sicily;  and  I  would  it  were  possible  to  charge  these  pages 
with  some  echo  of  his  voice  and  with  some  reflection  of  his 
manner.  But,  again,  one  cannot  have  everything. 

"Men's  work  we  have,"  quoth  one,  "but  we  want  them — 
Them  palpable  to  touch  and  clear  to  view." 
Is  it  so  nothing,  then,  to  have  the  gem 
But  we  must  cry  to  have  the  setting  toof 

In  the  New  Quarterly  each  note  was  headed  with  a  reference 
to  its  place  in  the  Note-Books.  This  has  not  been  done  here 
because,  on  consideration,  it  seemed  useless,  and  even  irritat- 
ing, to  keep  on  putting  before  the  reader  references  which  he 
could  not  verify.  I  intend  to  give  to  the  British  Museum  a  copy 
of  this  volume  wherein  each  note  will  show  where  the  material 
of  which  it  is  composed  can  be  found;  thus,  if  the  original 
Note-Books  are  also  some  day  given  to  the  Museum,  any  one 
sufficiently  interested  will  be  able  to  see  exactly  what  I  have 
done  in  selecting,  omitting,  editing,  condensing  and  classifying. 

Some  items  are  included  that  are  not  actually  in  the  Note- 
Books;  the  longest  of  these  are  the  two  New  Zealand  articles 
"Darwin  among  the  Machines"  and  "Lucubratio  Ebria"  as  to 
which  something  is  said  in  the  Prefatory  Note  to  "The  Germs 
of  Erewhon  and  of  Life  and  Habit"  (pp.  39-42  post).  In  that 
Prefatory  Note  a  Dialogue  on  Species  by  Butler  and  an  auto- 
graph letter  from  Charles  Darwin  are  mentioned.  Since  the 
note  was  in  type  I  have  received  from  New  Zealand  a  copy  of 


xiv      Preface  to  the  Original  Edition 

the  Weekly  Press  of  igth  June,  1912,  containing  the  Dialogue 
again  reprinted  and  a  facsimile  reproduction  of  Darwin's  let- 
ter. I  thank  Mr.  W.  H.  Triggs,  the  present  editor  of  the 
Press,  Christchurch,  New  Zealand,  also  Miss  Colborne-Veel 
and  the  members  of  the  staff  for  their  industry  and  persever- 
ance in  searching  for  and  identifying  Butler's  early  contribu- 
tions to  the  newspaper. 

The  other  principal  items  not  actually  in  the  Note-Books, 
the  letter  to  T.  W.  G.  Butler  (pp.  53-5  post),  "A  Psalm  of 
Montreal"  (pp.  388-9  post)  and  "The  Righteous  Man"  (pp. 
390-1  post).  I  suppose  Butler  kept  all  these  out  of  his  notes 
because  he  considered  that  they  had  served  their  purpose;  but 
they  have  not  hitherto  appeared  in  a  form  now  accessible  to 
the  general  reader. 

All  the  footnotes  are  mine  and  so  are  all  those  prefatory 
notes  which  are  printed  in  italics  and  the  explanatory  remarks 
in  square  brackets  which  occur  occasionally  in  the  text.  I  have 
also  preserved,  in  square  brackets,  the  date  of  a  note  when  any- 
thing seemed  to  turn  on  it.  And  I  have  made  the  index. 

The  Biographical  Statement  is  founded  on  a  skeleton  Diary 
which  is  in  the  Note-Books.  It  is  intended  to  show,  among 
other  things,  how  intimately  the  great  variety  of  subjects 
touched  upon  in  the  notes  entered  into  and  formed  part  of 
Butler's  working  life.  It  does  not  stop  at  the  iSth  of  June, 
1902,  because,  as  he  says  (p.  23  post),  "Death  is  not  more  the 
end  of  some  than  it  is  the  beginning  of  others" ;  and,  again 
(p.  13  post),  for  those  who  come  to  the  true  birth  the  life  we 
live  beyond  the  grave  is  our  truest  life.  The  Biographical 
Statement  has  accordingly  been  carried  on  to  the  present  time 
so  as  to  include  the  principal  events  that  have  occurred  dur- 
ing the  opening  period  of  the  "good  average  three-score  years 
and  ten  of  immortality"  which  he  modestly  hoped  he  might 
inherit  in  the  life  of  the  world  to  come. 

HENRY  FESTING  JONES. 

Mount  Eryx, 

Trapani,  Sicily, 

August,  1912. 


Contents 


PAGE 

Biographical  Statement X 

I.    Lord,  What  is  Man? 9 

II.    Elementary   Morality.       .       .        .        .        .        .        .  24 

III.  The  Germs  of  Erewhon  and  of  Life  and  Habit  .        .  39 

IV.  Memory  and   Design       . 56 

V.    Vibrations 66 

VI.  Mind  and  Matter 74 

VII.  On  the  Making  of  Music,  Pictures  and  Books    .        .      93 

VIII.  Handel  and  Music no 

IX.  A  Painter's  Views  on  Painting      .        .        .        .        .135 

X.  The  Position  of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri  ....    '155 

XL  Cash  and  Credit      ....       .       .        .        .168 

XII.  The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature        .        .        .        .183 

XIII.  Unprofessional  Sermons 200 

XIV.  Higgledy-Piggledy 215 

XV.  Titles  and  Subjects 229 

XVI.    Written  Sketches 237 

XVII.    Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel  to  Alps  and  Sanc- 
tuaries    259 

XVIII.    Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited 288 

XIX.    Truth  and  Convenience  . 297 

xv 


PAGE 


xvi  Contents 

XX.    First   Principles 309 

XXI.    Rebelliousness 332 

XXII.     Reconciliation 346 

XXIII.  Death 353 

XXIV.  The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 360 

XXV.    Poems 379 

Index  .  399 


The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler 


Biographical  Statement 

1835.  Dec.  4.  Samuel  Butler  born  at  Langar  Rectory,  Not- 
tingham, son  ,of  the  Rev.  Thomas  Butler,  who  was 
the  son  of  Dr.  Samuel  Butler,  Headmaster  of  Shrews- 
bury School  from  1798  to  1836,  and  afterwards 
Bishop  of  Lichfield. 

1843-4.  Spent  the  winter  in  Rome  and  Naples  with  his 
family. 

1846.    Went  to  school  at  Allesley,  near  Coventry. 

1848.    Went  to  school  at  Shrewsbury  under  Dr.  Kennedy. 
Went  to  Italy  for  the  second  time  with  his  family. 
First  heard  the  music  of  Handel. 

1854.    Entered  at  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge. 

1858.  Bracketed  I2th  in  the  first  class  of  the  Classical  Tripos 

and  took  his  degree. 

Went  to  London  and  began  to  prepare  for  ordination, 
living  among  the  poor  and  doing  parish  work:  this 
led  to  his  doubting  the  efficacy  of  infant  baptism  and 
hence  to  his  declining  to  take  orders. 

1859.  Sailed  for  New  Zealand  and  started  sheep-farming  in 

Canterbury  Province :  while  in  the  colony  he  wrote 
much  for  the  Press  of  Christchurch,  N.Z. 

1862.  Dec.  20.    "Darwin  on  The  Origin  of  Species.     A  Dia- 

logue," unsigned  but  written  by  Butler,  appeared  in 
the  Press  and  was  followed  by  correspondence  to 
which  Butler  contributed. 

1863.  A  First  Year  in  Canterbury  Settlement:  made  out  of 

his  letters  home  to  his  family  together  with  two  arti- 
cles reprinted  from  the  Eagle  (the  magazine  of  St. 
John's  College,  Cambridge)  :  MS.  lost. 


2  Biographical  Statement 

1863.  "Darwin  among  the  Machines,"  a  letter  signed  "Cel- 

larius"  written  by  Butler,  appeared  in  the  Press. 

1864.  Sold  out  his  sheep  run  and  returned  to  England  in 

company  with  Charles  Paine  Pauli,  whose  acquaint- 
ance he  had  made  in  the  colony.  He  brought  back 
enough  to  enable  him  to  live  quietly,  settled  for  good 
at  15  Clifford's  Inn,  London,  and  began  life  as  a 
painter,  studying  at  Gary's,  Heatherley's  and  the 
South  Kensington  Art  Schools  and  exhibiting  pic- 
tures occasionally  at  the  Royal  Academy  and  other 
exhibitions:  while  studying  art  he  made  the 
acquaintance  of,  among  others,  Charles  Gogin, 
William  Ballard  and  Thomes  William  Gale  Butler. 
"Family  Prayers"  :  a  small  painting  by  Butler. 

1865.  "Lucubratio  Ebria,"  an  article,  containing  variations 

of  the  view  in  "Darwin  among  the  Machines,"  sent 
by  Butler  from  England,  appeared  in  the  Press. 
The  Evidence  for  the  Resurrection  of  Jesus  Christ  as 
contained  in  the  Four  Evangelists  critically  exam- 
ined: a  pamphlet  of  VIII+48  pp.  written  in  New 
Zealand :  the  conclusion  arrived  at  is  that  the  evi- 
dence is  insufficient  to  support  the  belief  that  Christ 
died  and  rose  from  the  dead :  MS.  lost,  probably  used 
up  in  writing  The  Fair  Haven. 

1869-70.  Was  in  Italy  for  four  months,  his  health  having 
broken  down  in  consequence  of  over-work. 

1870  or  1871.  First  meeting  with  Miss  Eliza  Mary  Ann 
Savage,  from  whom  he  drew  Alethea  in  The  Way  of 
All  Flesh. 

1872.  Erewhon  or  Over  the  Range:  a  Work  of  Satire  and 

Imagination :  MS.  in  the  British  Museum. 

1873.  Erewhon  translated  into  Dutch. 

The  Fair  Haven:  an  ironical  work,  purporting  to  be 
"in  defence  of  the  miraculous  element  in  our  Lord's 
ministry  upon  earth,  both  as  against  rationalistic 
impugners  and  certain  orthodox  defenders,"  written 
under  the  pseudonym  of  John  Pickard  Owen,  with 
a  memoir  of  the  supposed  author  by  his  brother 
William  Bickersteth  Owen.  This  book  reproduces 
the  substance  of  his  pamphlet  on  the  resurrection: 
MS.  at  Christchurch,  New  Zealand. 


Biographical  Statement  3 

1874.  "Mr.  Heatherley's  Holiday,"  his  most  important  oil 
painting,  exhibited  at  the  Royal  Academy  Exhibition, 
now  in  the  National  Gallery  of  British  Art. 

1876.  Having  invested  his  money  in  various  companies  that 

failed,  one  of  which  had  its  works  in  Canada,  and 
having  spent  much  time  during  the  last  few  years  in 
that  country,  trying  unsuccessfully  to  save  part  of 
his  capital,  he  now  returned  to  London,  and  during 
the  next  ten  years  experienced  serious  financial  diffi- 
culties. 
"  First  meeting  with  Henry  Festing  Jones. 

1877.  Life  and  Habit:  an  Essay  after  a  Completer  View  of 

Evolution :  dedicated  to  Charles  Paine  Pauli : 
although  dated  1878  the  book  was  published  on  But- 
ler's birthday,  4th  December,  1877:  MS.  at  the 
Schools,  Shrewsbury. 

1878.  "A  Psalm  of  Montreal"  in  the  Spectator:  There  are 

probably  many  MSS.  of  this  poem  in  existence  given 
by  Butler  to  friends :  one,  which  he  gave  to  H.  F. 
Jones,  is  in  the  Fitzwilliam  Museum,  Cambridge. 
A  Portrait  of  Butler,  painted  in  this  year  by  himself, 
now  at  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge. 

1879.  Evolution  Old  and  New:  A  comparison  of  the  theories 

of  Buffon,  Dr.  Erasmus  Darwin  and  Lamarck  with 
that  of  Charles  Darwin :  MS.  in  the  Fitzwilliam  Mu- 
seum, Cambridge. 

A  Clergyman's  Doubts  and  God  the  Known  and  God 
the  Unknown  appeared  in  the  Examiner.  MS.  lost. 

Erewhon  translated  into  German. 

1880.  Unconscious   Memory:   A    comparison    between    the 

theory  of  Dr.  Ewald  Hering,  Professor  of  Physiology 
in  the  University  of  Prague,  and  the  Philosophy  of 
the  Unconscious  of  Dr.  Edward  von  Hartmann,  with 
translations  from  both  these  authors  and  preliminary 
chapters  bearing  upon  Life  and  Habit,  Evolution 
Old  and  New,  and  Charles  Darwin's  Edition  of  Dr. 
Krause's  Erasmus  Darwin. 

A  Portrait  of  Butler,  painted  in  this  year  by  himself, 
now  at  the  Schools,  Shrewsbury.  A  third  portrait 
of  Butler,  painted  by  himself  about  this  time,  is  at 
Christchurch,  New  Zealand. 


4  Biographical  Statement 

1881.  A  property  at  Shrewsbury,  in  which  under  his  grand- 

father's will  he  had  a  reversionary  interest  contingent 
on  his  surviving  his  father,  was  re-settled  so  as  to 
make  his  reversion  absolute :  he  mortgaged  this  re- 
version and  bought  small  property  near  London : 
this  temporarily  alleviated  his  financial  embarrass- 
ment but  added  to  his  work,  for  he  spent  much  time 
in  the  management  of  the  houses,  learnt  book- 
keeping by  double-entry  and  kept  elaborate  ac- 
counts. 

Alps  and  Sanctuaries  of  Piedmont  and  the  Canton 
Ticino  illustrated  by  the  author,  Charles  Gogin  and 
Henry  Festing  Jones :  an  account  of  his  holiday 
travels  with  dissertations  on  most  of  the  subjects  that 
interested  him :  MS.  with  H.  F.  Jones. 

1882.  A  new  edition  of  Evolution  Old  and  New,  with  a  short 

preface  alluding  to  the  recent  death  of  Charles  Dar- 
win, an  appendix  and  an  index. 

1883.  Began  to  compose  music  as  nearly  as  he  could  in  the 

style  of  Handel. 

1884.  Selections  from  Previous  Works  with  "A  Psalm  of 

Montreal"  and  "Remarks  on  G.  J.  Romanes'  Mental 
Evolution  in  Animals." 

1885.  Death  of  Miss  Savage. 

Gavottes,  Minuets,  Fugues  and  other  short  pieces  for 
the  piano  by  Samuel  Butler  and  Henry  Festing 
Jones :  MS.  with  H.  F.  Jones. 

1886.  Holbein's  La  Danse:  a  note  on  a  drawing  in  the  Mu- 

seum at  Basel. 
Stood,  unsuccessfully,  for  the  Professorship  of  Fine 

Arts  in  the  University  of  Cambridge. 
Dec.  29.    Death  of  his  father  and  end  of  his  financial 

embarrassments. 

1887.  Engaged  Alfred  Emery  Cathie  as  clerk  and  general 

attendant. 

"      Luck  or  Cunning  as  the  main  means  of  Organic  Modi- 
fication ?    An  attempt  to  throw  additional  light  upon 
Charles  Darwin's  theory  of  Natural  Selection. 
Was  entertained  at  dinner  by  the  Municipio  of  Varallo- 
Sesia  on  the  Sacro  Monte. 

1888.  Took  up  photography. 


Biographical  Statement  5 

1888.  Ex  Voto:  an  account  of  the  Sacro  Monte  or  New  Jeru- 
salem at  Varallo-Sesia,  with  some  notice  of  Taba- 
chetti's  remaining  work  at  Crea  and  illustrations  from 
photographs  by  the  author :  MS.  at  Varallo-Sesia. 
Narcissus:  a  Cantata  in  the  Handelian  form,  words 
and  music  by  Samuel  Butler  and  Henry  Festing 
Jones :  MS.  of  the  piano  score  in  the  British  Museum. 
MS.  of  the  orchestral  score  with  H.  F.  Jones. 
In  this  and  the  two  following  years  contributed  some 
articles  to  the  Universal  Review,  most  of  which  were 
republished  after  his  death  as  Essays  on  Life,  Art, 
and  Science  (1904). 

1890.  Began  to  study  counterpoint  with  William  Smith  Rock- 
stro  and  continued  to  do  so  until  Rockstro's  death  in 
1895. 

1892.  The  Humour  of  Homer.    A  Lecture  delivered  at  the 

Working  Men's  College,  Great  Ormond  Street,  Lon- 
don, January  30,  1892,  reprinted  with  preface  and  ad- 
ditional matter  from  the  Eagle. 

"  Went  to  Sicily,  the  first  of  many  visits,  to  collect  evi- 
dence in  support  of  his  theory  identifying  the  Scheria 
and  Ithaca  of  the  Odyssey  with  Trapani  and  the 
neighbouring  Mount  Eryx. 

1893.  "L'Origine  Siciliana  dell'  Odissea."     Extracted  from 

the  Rassegna  delta  Letteratura  Siciliana. 
"On  theTrapanese  Origin  of  theOdyssey"  ( Translation  ) . 

1894.  Ex  Voto  translated  into  Italian  by  Cavaliere  Angelo 

Rizzetti. 

"Ancora  sull'  origine  dell'  Odissea."    Extracted  from 
the  Rassegna  delta  Letteratura  Siciliana. 

1895.  Went  to  Greece  and  the  Troad  to  make  up  his  mind 

about  the  topography  of  the  Iliad. 

1896.  The  Life  and  Letters  of  Dr.  Samuel  Butler  (his  grand- 

father)  in  so  far  as  they  illustrate  the  scholastic, 
religious  and  social  life  of  England  from  1790-1840: 
MS.  at  the  Shrewsbury  Town  Library  or  Museum. 
"       His  portrait  painted  by  Charles  Gogin,  now  in  the  Na- 
tional Portrait  Gallery. 

1897.  The  Authoress  of  theOdyssey,  where  and  when  she  wrote, 

who  she  was,  the  use  she  made  of  the  Iliad  and  how 
the  poem  grew  under  her  hands :  MS.  at  Trapani. 


6  Biographical  Statement 

1897.  Death  of  Charles  Paine  Pauli. 

1898.  The  Iliad  rendered   into  English  prose:  MS.  at  St. 

John's  College,  Cambridge. 

1899.  Shakespeare's  Sonnets  reconsidered  and  in  part  rear- 

ranged, with  introductory  chapters,  notes  and  a  re- 
print of  the  original  1609  edition :  MS.  with  R.  A. 
Streatfeild. 

1900.  The  Odyssey  rendered  into  English  prose:  MS.  at  Aci- 

Reale,  Sicily. 

1901.  Erewhon  Revisited  twenty  years  later  both  by  the  Orig- 

inal Discoverer  of  the  Country  and  by  his  Son :  this 
was  a  return  not  only  to  Erewhon  but  also  to  the 
subject  of  the  pamphlet  on  the  resurrection.  MS. 
in  the  British  Museum. 

1902.  June,  18.    Death  of  Samuel  Butler. 


1902.  "Samuel  Butler,"  an   article  by  Richard  Alexander 

Streatfeild  in  the  Monthly  Review  (September). 
"Samuel  Butler,"  an  obituary  notice  by  Henry  Fest- 
ing  Jones  in  the  Eagle  (December). 

1903.  Samuel  Butler  Records  and  Memorials,  a  collection  of 

obituary  notices  with  a  note  by  R.  A.  Streatfeild, 
his  literary  executor,  printed  for  private  circulation : 
With  reproduction  of  a  photograph  of  Butler  taken 
at  Varallo  in  1889. 

"  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  a  novel,  written  between  1872 
and  1885,  published  by  R.  A.  Streatfeild:  MS.  with 
Mr.  R.  A.  Streatfeild. 

1904.  Seven  Sonnets  and  A  Psalm  of  Montreal  printed  for 

private  circulation. 

Essays  on  Life,  Art  and  Science,  being  reprints  of 
his  Universal  Review  articles,  together  with  two  lec- 
tures. 

Ulysses,  an  Oratorio:  Words  and  music  by  Samuel 
Butler  and  Henry  Festing  Jones:  MS.  of  the  piano 
score  in  the  British  Museum,  MS.  of  the  orchestral 
score  with  H.  F.  Jones. 

"  "The  Author  of  Erewhon,"  an  article  by  Desmond 
MacCarthy  in  the  Independent  Review  (September). 


Biographical  Statement  7 

1904.  Diary  of  a  Journey  through  North  Italy  to  Sicily  (in 
the  spring  of  1903,  undertaken  for  the  purpose  of 
leaving  the  MSS.  of  three  books  by  Samuel  Butler  at 
Varallo-Sesia,  Aci-Reale  and  Trapani)  by  Henry 
Festing  Jones,  with  reproduction  of  Gogin's  portrait 
of  Butler.  Printed  for  private  circulation. 

1907.  Nov.  Between  this  date  and  May,  1910,  some  Extracts 

from  The  Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler  appeared  in 
the  New  Quarterly  Review  under  the  editorship  of 
Desmond  MacCarthy. 

1908.  July  16.    The  first  Erewhon  dinner  at  Pagani's  Restau- 

rant, Great  Portland  Street;  32  persons  present: 
the  day  was  fixed  by  Professor  Marcus  Hartog. 
Second  Edition  of  The  Way  of  All  Flesh. 

1909.  God  the  Known  and  God  the  Unknown  republished  in 

book  form  from  the  Examiner   (1879)   by  A.  C. 
Fifield,  with  prefatory  note  by  R.  A.  Streatfeild. 
"       July  15.    The  second  Erewhon  dinner  at  Pagani's;  53 
present :  the  day  was  fixed  by  Mr.  George  Bernard 
Shaw. 

1910.  Feb.  10.  Samuel  Butler  Author  of  Erewhon,  a  Paper 

read  before  the  British  Association  of  Homoeopathy 
at  43  Russell  Square,  W.C.,  by  Henry  Festing  Jones. 
Some  of  Butler's  music  was  performed  by  Miss 
Grainger  Kerr,  Mr.  R.  A.  Streatfeild,  Mr.  J.  A. 
Fuller  Maitland  and  Mr.  H.  J.  T.  Wood,  the  Secre- 
tary of  the  Association. 

June.  Unconscious  Memory,  a  new  edition  entirely  reset 
with  a  note  by  R.  A.  Streatfeild  and  an  introduction 
by  Professor  Marcus  Hartog,  M.A.,D.SC.,F.L.SVF.R.H.S., 
Professor  of  Zoology  in  University  College,  Cork. 

"  July  14.  The  third  Erewhon  dinner  at  Pagani's  Restau- 
rant ;  58  present :  the  day  was  fixed  by  the  Right  Hon- 
ourable Augustine  Birrell,  K.C.,  M.P. 

"  Nov.  16.  Samuel  Butler  Author  of  Erewhon.  A  paper 
read  before  the  Historical  Society  of  St.  John's  Col- 
lege, Cambridge,  in  the  Combination-room  of  the 
college,  by  Henry  Festing  Jones.  The  Master  (Mr. 
R.  F.'  Scott),  who  was  also  Vice-Chancellor  of  the 
University,  was  in  the  chair  and  a  Vote  of  Thanks 
was  proposed  by  Professor  Bateson,  F.R.S. 


8  Biographical  Statement 

1910.  Nov.  28.    Life  and  Habit,  a  new  edition  with  a  preface 

by  R.  A.  Streatfeild  and  author's  addenda,  being 
three  pages  containing  passages  which  Butler  had 
cut  out  of  the  original  book  or  had  intended  to  insert 
in  a  future  edition. 

1911.  May  25.   The  jubilee  number  of  the  Press,  New  Zea- 

land, contained  an  account  of  Butler's  connection  with 
the  newspaper  and  reprinted  "Darwin  among  the 
Machines"  and  "Lucubratio  Ebria." 

"  July  15.  The  fourth  Erewhon  dinner  at  Pagani's  Res- 
taurant ;  75  present :  the  day  was  fixed  by  Sir  William 
Phipson  Beale,  Bart.,  K.C.,  M.P. 

Nov.  Charles  Darwin  and  Samuel  Butler:  A  Step 
towards  Reconciliation,  by  Henry  Festing  Jones.  A 
pamphlet  giving  the  substance  of  a  correspondence 
between  Mr.  Francis  Darwin  and  the  author  and 
reproducing  letters  by  Charles  Darwin  about  the 
quarrel  between  himself  and  Butler  referred  to  in 
Chapter  IV  of  Unconscious  Memory. 

"  Evolution  Old  and  New,  a  reprint  of  the  second  edition 
(1882)  with  prefatory  note  by  R.  A.  Streatfeild. 

1912.  June   i.     Letter  from   Henry   Festing  Jones   in  the 

Press,  Christchurch,  New  Zealand,  about  Butler's 
Dialogue,  which  had  appeared  originally  in  the  Press 
December  20,  1862,  and  could  not  be  found. 

"  June  8.  "Darwin  on  the  Origin  of  Species.  A  Dia- 
logue" discovered  in  consequence  of  the  foregoing 
letter  and  reprinted  in  the  Press. 

"  June  15.  The  Press  reprinted  some  of  the  correspon- 
dence, etc.,  which  followed  on  the  original  appear- 
ance of  the  Dialogue. 

"  Some  of  Butler's  water-colour  drawings  having  been 
given  to  the  British  Museum,  two  were  included  in 
an  exhibition  held  there  during  the  summer. 

"  July  12.  The  Fifth  Erewhon  Dinner  at  Pagani's  Res- 
taurant; 90  present:  the  day  was  fixed  by  Mr.  Ed- 
mund Gosse,  C.B.,  LL.D. 


I 

Lord,  What  is  Man? 

Man 
i 

WE  are  like  billiard  balls  in  a  game  played  by  unskilful  play- 
ers, continually  being  nearly  sent  into  a  pocket,  but  hardly  ever 
getting  right  into  one,  except  by  a  fluke. 


We  are  like  thistle-down  blown  about  by  the  wind — up  and 
down,  here  and  there — but  not  one  in  a  thousand  ever  getting 
beyond  seed-hood. 

iii 

A  man  is  a  passing  mood  coming  and  going  in  the  mind  of 
his  country ;  he  is  the  twitching  of  a  nerve,  a  smile,  a  frown, 
a  thought  of  shame  or  honour,  as  it  may  happen. 

iv 

How  loosely  our  thoughts  must  hang  together  when  the 
whiff  of  a  smell,  a  band  playing  in  the  street,  a  face  seen  in 
the  fire,  or  on  the  gnarled  stem  of  a  tree,  will  lead  them  into 
such  vagaries  at  a  moment's  warning. 


When  I  was  a  boy  at  school  at  Shrewsbury,  old  Mrs.  Brown 
used  to  keep  a  tray  of  spoiled  tarts  which  she  sold  cheaper. 
They  most  of  them  looked  pretty  right  till  you  handled  them. 
We  are  all  spoiled  tarts. 

vi  . 

He  is  a  poor  creature  who  does  not  believe  himself  to  be 
better  than  the  whole  world  else.  No  matter  how  ill  we  may 

9 


io  Lord,  What  is  Man? 

be,  or  how  low  we  may  have  fallen,  we  would  not  change 
identity  with  any  other  person.    Hence  our  self-conceit  sus- 
tains and  always  must  sustain  us  till  death  takes  us  and  our 
x  conceit  together  so  that  we  need  no  more  sustaining. 

vii 

Man  must  always  be  a  consuming  fire  or  be  consumed.  As 
for  hell,  we  are  in  a  burning  fiery  furnace  all  our  lives — for 
what  is  life  but  a  process  of  combustion  ? 


Life 


We  have  got  into  life  by  stealth  and  petitio  principii,  by 
the  free  use  of  that  contradiction  in  terms  which  we  declare 
to  be  the  most  outrageous  violation  of  our  reason.  We  have 
wriggled  into  it  by  holding  that  everything  is  both  one  and 
many,  both  infinite  in  time  and  space  and  yet  finite,  both  like 
and  unlike  to  the  same  thing,  both  itself  and  not  itself,  both 
free  and  yet  inexorably  fettered,  both  every  adjective  in  the 
dictionary  and  at  the  same  time  the  flat  contradiction  of  every 
one  of  them. 

ii 

The  beginning  of  life  is  the  beginning  of  an  illusion  to  the 
effect  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  free  will  and  that  there  is 
such  another  thing  as  necessity — the  recognition  of  the  fact 
that  there  is  an  "I  can"  and  an  "I  cannot,"  an  "I  may"  and 
an  "I  must." 

iii 

Life  is  not  so  much  a  riddle  to  be  read  as  a  Gordian  knot 
that  will  get  cut  sooner  or  later. 

iv 
Life  is  the  distribution  of  an  error — or  errors. 


Murray  (the  publisher)  said  that  my  Life  of  Dr.  Butler  was 
an  omnium  gatherum.    Yes,  but  life  is  an  omnium  gatherum. 


Lord,  What  is  Man?  n 

vi 

Life  is  a  superstition.  But  superstitions  are  not  without 
their  value.  The  snail's  shell  is  a  superstition,  slugs  have  no 
shells  and  thrive  just  as  well.  But  a  snail  without  a  shell 
would  not  be  a  slug  unless  it  had  also  the  slug's  indifference 
to  a  shell. 

vii  i 

Life  is  one  long  process  of  getting  tired.  ; 

viii 
My  days  run  through  me  as  water  through  a  sieve. 

ix 

Life  is  the  art  of  drawing  sufficient  conclusions  from  in- 
sufficient premises. 

x 

Life  is  eight  parts  cards  and  two  parts  play,  the  unseen 
world  is  made  manifest  to  us  in  the  play. 

xi 

Lizards  generally  seem  to  have  lost  their  tails  by  the  time 
they  reach  middle  life.  So  have  most  men. 

xii 

A  sense  of  humour  keen  enough  to  show  a  man  his  own 
absurdities,  as  well  as  those  of  other  people,  will  keep  him 
from  the  commission  of  all  sins,  or  nearly  all,  save  those  that 
are  worth  committing. 

xiii 

Life  is  like  music,  it  must  be  composed  by  ear,  feeling  and 
instinct,  not  by  rule.  Nevertheless  one  had  better  know  the 
rules,  for  they  sometimes  guide  in  doubtful  cases — though  not 
often. 

xiv 

There  are  two  great  rules  of  life,  the  one  general  and  the 
other  particular.  The  first  is  that  every  one  can,  in  the  end, 
get  what  he  wants  if  he  only  tries.  This  is  the  general  rule. 
The  particular  rule  is  that  every  individual  is,  more  or  less, 
an  exception  to  the  general  rule. 


12  Lord,  What  is  Man? 

XV 

Nature  is  essentially  mean,  mediocre.  You  can  have 
schemes  for  raising  the  level  of  this  mean,  but  not  for  making 
every  one  two  inches  taller  than  his  neighbour,  and  this  is 
what  people  really  care  about. 

xvi 

All  progress  is  based  upon  a  universal  innate  desire  on  the 
part  of  every  organism  to  live  beyond  its  income. 

The  World 


The  world  is  a  gambling-table  so  arranged  that  all  who 
enter  the  casino  must  play  and  all  must  lose  more  or  less 
heavily  in  the  long  run,  though  they  win  occasionally  by  the 
way. 

ii 

We  play  out  our  days  as  we  play  out  cards,  taking  them 
as  they  come,  not  knowing  what  they  will  be,  hoping  for  a 
lucky  card  and  sometimes  getting  one,  often  getting  just  the 
wrong  one. 

iii 

The  world  may  not  be  particularly  wise — still,  we  know  of 
nothing  wiser. 

iv 

The  world  will  always  be  governed  by  self-interest.  We 
should  not  try  to  stop  this,  we  should  try  to  make  the  self- 
interest  of  cads  a  little  more  coincident  with  that  of  decent 
people. 

The  Individual  and  the  World 

There  is  an  eternal  antagonism  of  interest  between  the 
individual  and  the  world  at  large.  The  individual  will 
not  so  much  care  how  much  he  may  suffer  in  this  world 
provided  he  can  live  in  men's  good  thoughts  long  after  he 
has  left  it.  The  world  at  large  does  not  so  much  care  how 
much  suffering  the  individual  may  either  endure  or  cause 
in  this  life,  provided  he  will  take  himself  clean  away  out  of 
men's  thoughts,  whether  for  good  or  ill,  when  he  has  left  it. 


Lord,  What  is  Man?  13 

My  Life 

i 

I  imagine  that  life  can  give  nothing  much  better  or  much 
worse  than  what  I  have  myself  experienced.  I  should  say 
I  had  proved  pretty  well  the  extremes  of  mental  pleasure 
and  pain ;  and  so  I  believe  each  in  his  own  way  does,  almost 
every  man. 

ii 

I  have  squandered  my  life  as  a  schoolboy  squanders  a 
tip.  But  then  half,  or  more  than  half  the  fun  a  schoolboy 
gets  out  of  a  tip  consists  in  the  mere  fact  of  having  something 
to  squander.  Squandering  is  in  itself  delightful,  and  so  I 
found  it  with  my  life  in  my  younger  days.  I  do  not  squander 
it  now,  but  I  am  not  sorry  that  I  have  squandered  a  good  deal 
of  it.  What  a  heap  of  rubbish  there  would  have  been  if  I  had 
not!  Had  I  not  better  set  about  squandering  what  is  left 
of  it? 

The  Life  we  Live  in  Others 

A  man  should  spend  his  life  or,  rather,  does  spend  his  life 
in  being  born.  His  life  is  his  birth  throes.  But  most  men 
mis-carry  and  never  come  to  the  true  birth  at  all  and  some 
live  but  a  very  short  time  in  a  very  little  world  and  none  are 
eternal.  Still,  the  life  we  live  beyond  the  grave  is  our  truest 
life,  and  our  happiest,  for  we  pass  it  in  the  profoundest  sleep 
as  though  we  were  children  in  our  cradles.  If  we  are  wronged 
it  hurts  us  not ;  if  we  wrong  others,  we  do  not  suffer  for  it ; 
and  when  we  die,  as  even  the  Handels  and  Bellinis  and  Shake- 
speares  sooner  or  later  do,  we  die  easily,  know  neither  fear  \ 
nor  pain  and  live  anew  in  the  lives  of  those  who  have  been 
begotten  of  our  work  and  who  have  for  the  time  come  up 
in  our  room. 

An  immortal  like  Shakespeare  knows  nothing  of  his  own 
immortality  about  which  we  are  so  keenly  conscious.  As  he 
knows  nothing  of  it  when  it  is  in  its  highest  vitality,  centuries, 
it  may  be,  after  his  apparent  death,  so  it  is  best  and  happiest 
if  during  his  bodily  life  he  should  think  little  or  nothing  about 
it  and  perhaps  hardly  suspect  that  he  will  live  after  his  death  s 
at  all.  / 


14  Lord,  What  is  Man? 

And  yet  I  do  not  know — I  could  not  keep  myself  going  at 
all  if  I  did  not  believe  that  I  was  likely  to  inherit  a  good  aver- 
age three-score  years  and  ten  of  immortality.  There  are  very 
few  workers  who  are  not  sustained  by  this  belief,  or  at  least 
hope,  but  it  may  well  be  doubted  whether  this  is  not  a  sign 
that  they  are  not  going  to  be  immortal — and  I  am  content  (or 
try  to  be)  to  fare  as  my  neighbours. 


The  World  Made  to  Enjoy 

When  we  grumble  about  the  vanity  of  all  human  things, 
inasmuch  as  even  the  noblest  works  are  not  eternal  but  must 
become  sooner  or  later  as  though  they  had  never  been,  we 
should  remember  that  the  world*  so  far  as  we  can  see,  was 
made  to  enjoy  rather  than  to  last.  Come-and-go  pervades 
everything  of  which  we  have  knowledge,  and  though  great 
things  go  more  slowly,  they  are  built  up  of  small  ones  and 
must  fare  as  that  which  makes  them. 

Are  we  to  have  our  enjoyment  of  Handel  and  Shakespeare 
weakened  because  a  day  will  come  when  there  will  be  no 
more  of  either  Handel  or  Shakespeare  nor  yet  of  ears  to  hear 
them?  Is  it  not  enough  that  they  should  stir  such  countless 
multitudes  so  profoundly  and  kindle  such  intense  and  affec- 
tionate admiration  for  so  many  ages  as  they  have  done  and 
probably  will  continue  to  do?  The  life  of  a  great  thing  may 
be  so  long  as  practically  to  come  to  immortality  even  now, 
but  that  is  not  the  point.  The  point  is  that  if  anything  was 
aimed  at  at  all  when  things  began  to  shape  or  to  be  shaped, 
it  seems  to  have  been  a  short  life  and  a  merry  one,  with  an 
extension  of  time  in  certain  favoured  cases,  rather  than  a 
permanency  even  of  the  very  best  and  noblest.  And,  when 
one  comes  to  think  of  it,  death  and  birth  are  so  closely  cor- 
related that  one  could  not  destroy  either  without  destroying 
the  other  at  the  same  time.  It  is  extinction  that  makes  crea- 
tion possible. 

If,  however,  any  work  is  to  have  long  life  it  is  not  enough 
that  it  should  be  good  of  its  kind.  Many  ephemeral  things 
are  perfect  in  their  way.  It  must  be  of  a  durable  kind  as 
well. 


Lord,  What  is  Man?  15 

Living  in  Others 

We  had  better  live  in  others  as  much  as  we  can  if  only 
because  we  thus  live  more  in  the  race,  which  God  really  does 
seem  to  care  about  a  good  deal,  and  less  in  the  individual, 
to  whom,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  he  is  indifferent.  After  we  are 
dead  it  matters  not  to  the  life  we  have  led  in  ourselves  what 
people  may  say  of  us,  but  it  matters  much  to  the  life  we  lead 
in  others  and  this  should  be  our  true  life. 

Karma 

When  I  am  inclined  to  complain  about  having  worked  so 
many  years  and  taken  nothing  but  debt,  though  I  feel  the 
want  of  money  so  continually  (much  more,  doubtless,  than  I 
ought  to  feel  it),  let  me  remember  that  I  come  in  free,  gratis, 
to  the  work  of  hundreds  and  thousands  of  better  men  than 
myself  who  often  were  much  worse  paid  than  I  have  been.  If 
a  man's  true  self  is  his  karma — the  life  which  his  work  lives 
but  which  he  knows  very  little  about  and  by  which  he  takes 
nothing — let  him  remember  at  least  that  he  can  enjoy  the 
karma  of  others,  and  this  about  squares  the  account — or  rather 
far  more  than  squares  it.  [1883.] 

Birth  and  Death 

i 

They  are  functions  one  of  the  other  and  if  you  get  rid 
of  one  you  must  get  rid  of  the  other  also.  There  is  birth 
in  death  and  death  in  birth.  We  are  always  dying  and  being 
born  again. 

ii 

Life  is  the  gathering  of  waves  to  a  head,  at  death  they 
break  into  a  million  fragments  each  one  of  which,  however, 
is  absorbed  at  once  into  the  sea  of  life  and  helps  to  form  a 
later  generation  which  comes  rolling  on  till  it  too  breaks. 

iii 

What  happens  to  you  when  you  die?  But  what  happens 
to  you  when  you  are  born?  In  the  one  case  we  are  born 


1 6  Lord,  What  is  Man? 

and  in  the  other  we  die,  but  it  is  not  possible  to  get  much 
further. 

iv 

We  commonly  know  that  we  are  going  to  die  though  we 
do  not  know  that  we  are  going  to  be  born.  But  are  we  sure 
this  is  so?  We  may  have  had  the  most  gloomy  forebodings 
on  this  head  and  forgotten  all  about  them.  At  any  rate  we 
know  no  more  about  the  very  end  of  our  lives  than  about 
the  very  beginning.  We  come  up  unconsciously,  and  go  down 
unconsciously ;  and  we  rarely  see  either  birth  or  death.  We 
see  people,  as  consciousness,  between  the  two  extremes. 

Reproduction 

Its  base  must  be  looked  for  not  in  the  desire  of  the  parents 
to  reproduce  but  in  the  discontent  of  the  germs  with  their 
surroundings  inside  those  parents,  and  a  desire  on  their  part 
to  have  a  separate  maintenance.*  [1880.] 

Thinking  Almost  Identically 

The  ova,  spermatozoa  and  embryos  not  only  of  all  human 
races  but  of  all  things  that  live,  whether  animal  or  vegetable, 
think  little,  but  that  little  almost  identically  on  every  sub- 
ject. That  "almost"  is  the  little  rift  within  the  lute  which 
by  and  by  will  give  such  different  character  to  the  music. 
[1889.] 

*  "The  doctrine  preached  by  Weismann  was  that  to  start  with 
the  body  and  inquire  how  its  characters  got  into  the  germ  was  to 
view  the  sequence  from  the  wrong  end ;  the  proper  starting  point 
was  the  germ,  and  the  real  question  was  not  'How  do  the  characters 
of  the  organism  get  into  the  germ-cell  which  it  produces?'  but  'How 
are  the  characters  of  an  organism  represented  in  the  germ  which 
produces  it?'  Or,  as  Samuel  Butler  has  it,  the  proper  statement  of 
the  relation  between  successive  generations  is  not  to  say  that  a  hen 
produces  another  hen  through  the  medium  of  an  egg,  but  to  say  that 
a  hen  is  merely  an  egg's  way  of  producing  another  egg."  Breeding 
and  the  Mendelian  Discovery,  by  A.  D.  Darbishire.  Cassell  &  Co., 
1911,  p.  187-8. 

"It  has,  I  believe,  been  often  remarked  that  a  hen  is  only  an  egg's 
way  of  making  another  egg."  Life  and  Habit,  Triibner  &  Co.,  1878, 
chapter  viii,  p.  134. 

And  compare  the  idea  underlying  "The  World  of  the  Unborn"  in 
Erewhon. 


Lord,  What  is  Man?  17 

Is  Life  Worth  Living? 
This  is  a  question  for  an  embryo,  not  for  a  man.    [  1883.] 

Evacuations 

There  is  a  resemblance,  greater  or  less,  between  the  pleas- 
ure we  derive  from  all  the  evacuations.  I  believe  that  in  all 
cases  the  pleasure  arises  from  rest — rest,  that  is  to  say, 
from  the  considerable,  though  in  most  cases  unconscious 
labour  of  retaining  that  which  it  is  a  relief  to  us  to  be 
rid  of. 

In  ordinary  cases  the  effort  whereby  we  retain  those  things 
that  we  would  get  rid  of  is  unperceived  by  the  central  govern- 
ment, being,  I  suppose,  departmentally  made;  we — as  distin- 
guished from  the  subordinate  personalities  of  which  we  are 
composed — know  nothing  about  it,  though  the  subordinates  in 
question  doubtless  do.  But  when  the  desirability  of  remov- 
ing is  abnormally  great,  we  know  about  the  effort  of  retaining 
perfectly  well,  and  the  gradual  increase  in  our  percep- 
tion of  the  effort  suggests  strongly  that  there  has  been 
effort  all  the  time,  descending  to  conscious  and  great  through 
unconscious  and  normal  from  unconscious  and  hardly  any 
at  all.  The  relaxation  of  this  effort  is  what  causes 
the  sense  of  refreshment  that  follows  all  healthy  dis- 
charges. 

All  our  limbs  and  sensual  organs,  in  fact  our  whole  body 
and  life,  are  but  an  accretion  round  and  a  fostering  of  the 
spermatozoa.  They  are  the  real  "He."  A  man's  eyes,  ears, 
tongue,  nose,  legs  and  arms  are  but  so  many  organs  and  tools 
that  minister  to  the  protection,  education,  increased  intelli- 
gence and  multiplication  of  the  spermatozoa ;  so  that  our 
whole  life  is  in  reality  a  series  of  complex  efforts  in  respect 
of  these,  conscious  or  unconscious  according  to  their  com- 
parative commonness.  They  are  the  central  fact  in  our  exist- 
ence, the  point  towards  which  all  effort  is  directed.  Relaxa- 
tion of  effort  here,  therefore,  is  the  most  complete  and  com- 
prehensive of  all  relaxations  and,  as  such,  the  supreme  gratifi- 
cation— the  most  complete  rest  we  can  have,  short  of  sleep  and 
death. 


1 8  Lord,  What  is  Man? 

Man  and  His  Organism 
i 

Man  is  but  a  perambulating  tool-box  and  workshop,  or 
office,  fashioned  for  itself  by  a  piece  of  very  clever  slime, 
as  the  result  of  long  experience;  and  truth  is  but  its  own 
most  enlarged,  general  and  enduring  sense  of  the  coming 
togetherness  or  con-venience  of  the  various  conventional 
arrangements  which,  for  some  reason  or  other,  it  has  been 
led  to  sanction.  Hence  we  speak  of  man's  body  as  his 
"trunk." 

ii 

The  body  is  but  a  pair  of  pincers  set  over  a  bellows  and  a 
stewpan  and  the  whole  fixed  upon  stilts. 

iii 

A  man  should  see  himself  as  a  kind  of  tool-box ;  this  is 
simple  enough ;  the  difficulty  is  that  it  is  the  tools  them- 
selves that  make  and  work  the  tools.  The  skill  which  now 
guides  our  organs  and  us  in  arts  and  inventions  was  at  one 
time  exercised  upon  the  invention  of  these  very  organs  them- 
selves. Tentative  bankruptcy  acts  afford  good  illustrations  of 
the  manner  in  which  organisms  have  been  developed.  The 
ligaments  which  bind  the  tendons  of  our  feet  or  the  valves  of 
our  blood  vessels  are  the  ingenious  enterprises  of  individual 
cells  who  saw  a  want,  felt  that  they  could  supply  it,  and  have 
thus  won  themselves  a  position  among  the  old  aristocracy  of 
the  body  politic. 

The  most  incorporate  tool — as  an  eye  or  a  tooth  or  the 
fist,  when  a  blow  is  struck  with  it — has  still  something  of  the 
non-ego  about  it ;  and  in  like  manner  such  a  tool  as  a  locomo- 
tive engine,  apparently  entirely  separated  from,  the  body,  must 
still  from  time  to  time,  as  it  were,  kiss  the  soil  of  the  human 
body  and  be  handled,  and  thus  become  incorporate  with  man, 
if  it  is  to  remain  in  working  order. 

Tools 

A  tool  is  anything  whatsoever  which  is  used  by  an  intelli- 
gent being  for  realising  its  object.  The  idea  of  a  desired 


Lord,  What  is  Man?  19 

end  is  inseparable  from  a  tool.  The  very  essence  of  a  tool 
is  the  being  an  instrument  for  the  achievement  of  a  purpose. 
We  say  that  a  man  is  the  tool  of  another,  meaning  that 
he  is  being  used  for  the  furtherance  of  that  other's  ends, 
and  this  constitutes  him  a  machine  in  use.  Therefore  the 
word  "tool"  implies  also  the  existence  of  a  living,  intelligent 
being  capable  of  desiring  the  end  for  which  the  tool  is  used, 
for  this  is  involved  in  the  idea  of  a  desired  end.  And  as  few 
tools  grow  naturally  fit  for  use  (for  even  a  stick  or  a  fuller's 
teasel  must  be  cut  from  their  places  and  modified  to  some 
extent  before  they  can  be  called  tools),  the  word  "tool" 
implies  not  only  a  purpose  and  a  purposer,  but  a  purposer 
who  can  see  in  what  manner  his  purpose  can  be  achieved, 
and  who  can  contrive  (or  find  ready-made  and  fetch  and 
employ)  the  tool  which  shall  achieve  it. 

Strictly  speaking,  nothing  is  a  tool  unless  during  actual 
use.  Nevertheless,  if  a  thing  has  been  made  for  the  express 
purpose  of  being  used  as  a  tool  it  is  commonly  called  a  tool, 
whether  it  is  in  actual  use  or  no.  Thus  hammers,  chisels, 
etc.,  are  called  tools,  though  lying  idle  in  a  tool-box.  What 
is  meant  is  that,  though  not  actually  being  used  as  instru- 
ments at  the  present  moment,  they  bear  the  impress  of  their 
object,  and  are  so  often  in  use  that  we  may  speak  of  them 
as  though  they  always  were  so.  Strictly,  a  thing  is  a  tool 
or  not  a  tool  just  as  it  may  happen  to  be  in  use  or  not.  Thus 
a  stone  may  be  picked  up  and  used  to  hammer  a  nail  with, 
but  the  stone  is  not  a  tool  until  picked  up  with  an  eye  to 
use ;  it  is  a  tool  as  soon  as  this  happens,  and,  if  thrown  away 
immediately  the  nail  has  been  driven  home,  the  stone  is  a 
tool  no  longer.  We  see,  therefore,  matter  alternating  be- 
tween a  toolish  or  organic  state  and  an  untoolish  or  in- 
organic. Where  there  is  intention  it  is  organic,  where  there 
is  no  intention  it  is  inorganic.  Perhaps,  however,  the  word 
"tool"  should  cover  also  the  remains  of  a  tool  so  long  as 
there  are  manifest  signs  that  the  object  was  a  tool  once. 

The  simplest  tool  I  can  think  of  is  a  piece  of  gravel  used 
for  making,  a  road.  Nothing  is  done  to  it,  it  owes  its  being 
a  tool  simply  to  the  fact  that  it  subserves  a  purpose.  A 
broken  piece  of  granite  used  for  macadamising  a  road  is 
a  more  complex  instrument,  about  the  toolishness  of  which 
no  doubt  can  be  entertained.  It  will,  however,  I  think,  be 


20  Lord,  What  is  Man? 

held  that  even  a  piece  of  gravel  found  in  situ  and  left  there 
untouched,  provided  it  is  so  left  because  it  was  deemed 
suitable  for  a  road  which  was  designed  to  pass  over  the  spot, 
would  become  a  tool  in  virute  of  the  recognition  of  its  utility, 
while  a  similar  piece  of  gravel  a  yard  off  on  either  side  the 
proposed  road  would  not  be  a  tool. 

The  essence  of  a  tool,  therefore,  lies  in  something  outside 
the  tool  itself.  It  is  not  in  the  head  of  the  hammer,  nor  in 
the  handle,  nor  in  the  combination  of  the  two  that  the  essence 
of  mechanical  characteristics  exists,  but  in  the  recognition 
of  its  utility  and  in  the  forces  directed  through  it  in  virtue 
of  this  recognition.  This  appears  more  plainly  when  we 
reflect  that  a  very  complex  machine,  if  intended  for  use  by 
children  whose  aim  is  not  serious,  ceases  to  rank  in  our 
minds  as  a  tool,  and  becomes  a  toy.  It  is  seriousness  of  aim 
and  recognition  of  suitability  for  the  achievement  of  that  aim, 
and  not  anything  in  the  tool  itself,  that  makes  the  tool. 

The  goodness  or  badness,  again,  of  a  tool  depends  not  upon 
anything  within  the  tool  as  regarded  without  relation  to  the 
user,  but  upon  the  ease  or  difficulty  experienced  by  the  person 
using  it  in  comparison  with  what  he  or  others  of  average 
capacity  would' experience  if  they  had  used  a  tool  of  a  differ- 
ent kind.  Thus  the  same  tool  may  be  good  for  one  man  and 
bad  for  another. 

It  seems  to  me  that  all  tools  resolve  themselves  into  the 
hammer  and  the  lever,  and  that  the  lever  is  only  an  inverted 
hammer,  or  the  hammer  only  an  inverted  lever,  whichever 
one  wills ;  so  that  all  the  problems  of  mechanics  are  present 
to  us  in  the  simple  stone  which  may  be  used  as  a  hammer, 
or  in  the  stick  that  may  be  used  as  a  lever,  as  much  as  in 
the  most  complicated  machine.  These  are  the  primordial 
cells  of  mechanics.  And  an  organ  is  only  another  name  for 
a  tool. 


Organs  and  Makeshifts 

I  have  gone  out  sketching  and  forgotten  my  water-dipper; 
among  my  traps  I  always  find  something  that  will  do,  for 
example,  the  top  of  my  tin  case  (for  holding  pencils).  This 
is  how  organs  come  to  change  their  uses  and  hence  their 
forms,  or  at  any  rate  partly  how. 


Lord,  What  is  Man?  21 


Joining  and  Disjoining 

These  are  the  essence  of  change. 

One  of  the  earliest  notes  I  made,  when  I  began  to  make 
notes  at  all,  I  found  not  long  ago  in  an  old  book,  since 
destroyed,  which  I  had  in  New  Zealand.  It  was  to  the  effect 
that  all  things  are  either  of  the  nature  of  a  piece  of  string  or 
a  knife.  That  is,  they  are  either  for  bringing  and  keeping 
things  together,  or  for  sending  and  keeping  them  apart. 
Nevertheless  each  kind  contains  a  little  of  its  opposite  and 
some,  as  the  railway  train  and  the  hedge,  combine  many 
examples  of  both.  Thus  the  train,  on  the  whole,  is  used  for 
bringing  things  together,  but  it  is  also  used  for  sending  them 
apart,  and  its  divisions  into  classes  are  alike  for  separating 
and  keeping  together.  The  hedge  is  also  both  for  joining 
things  (as  a  flock  of  sheep)  and  for  disjoining  (as  for  keeping 
the  sheep  from  getting  into  corn).  These  are  the  more  im- 
mediate ends.  The  ulterior  ends,  both  of  train  and  hedge, 
so  far  as  we  are  concerned,  and  so  far  as  anything  can  have 
an  end,  are  the  bringing  or  helping  to  bring  meat  or  dairy 
produce  into  contact  with  man's  inside,  or  wool  on  to  his 
back,  or  that  he  may  go  in  comfort  somewhere  to  converse 
with  people  and  join  his  soul  on  to  theirs,  or  please  himself 
by  getting  something  to  come  within  the  range  of  his  senses 
or  imagination. 

A  piece  of  string  is  a  thing  that,  in  the  main,  makes  for 
togetheriness ;  whereas  a  knife  is,  in  the  main,  a  thing  that 
makes  for  splitty-uppiness ;  still,  there  is  an  odour  of  to- 
getheriness hanging  about  a  knife  also,  for  it  tends  to  bring 
potatoes  into  a  man's  stomach. 

In  high  philosophy  one  should  never  look  at  a  knife  with- 
out considering  it  also  as  a  piece  of  string,  nor  at  a  piece  of 
string  without  considering  it  also  as  a  knife. 

Cotton  Factories 

Surely  the  work  done  by  the  body  is,  in  one  way,  more 
its  true  life  than  its  limbs  and  organisation  are.  Which 
is  the  more  true  life  of  a  great  cotton  factory — the  bales 
of  goods  which  it  turns  out  for  the  world's  wearing  or  the 


22  Lord,  What  is  Man? 

machinery  whereby  its  ends  are  achieved  ?  The  manufacture 
is  only  possible  by  reason  of  the  machinery;  it  is  produced 
by  this.  The  machinery  only  exists  in  virtue  of  its  being 
capable  of  producing  the  manufacture;  it  is  produced  for 
this.  The  machinery  represents  the  work  done  by  the  factory 
that  turned  it  out. 

Somehow  or  other  when  we  think  of  a  factory  we  think 
rather  of  the  fabric  and  mechanism  than  of  the  work,  and  so 
we  think  of  a  man's  life  and  living  body  as  constituting 
himself  rather  than  of  the  work  that  the  life  and  living  body 
turn  out.  The  instinct  being  as  strong  as  it  is,  I  suppose 
it  sound,  but  it  seems  as  though  the  life  should  be  held  to  be 
quite  as  much  in  the  work  itself  as  in  the  tools  that  produce 
it — and  perhaps  more. 

Our  Trivial  Bodies 


Though  we  think  so  much  of  our  body,  it  is  in  reality 
a  small  part  of  us.  Before  birth  we  get  together  our  tools, 
in  life-  we  use  them,  and  thus  fashion  our  true  life  which 
consists  not  in  our  tools  and  tool-box  but  in  the  work  we 
have  done  with  oui  tools.  It  is  Handel's  work,  not  the  body 
with  which  he  did  the  work,  that  pulls  us  half  over  London. 
There  is  not  an  action  of  a  muscle  in  a  horse's  leg  upon  a 
winter's  night  as  it  drags  a  carriage  to  the  Albert  Hall  but 
is  in  connection  with,  and  part  outcome  of,  the  force  gen- 
erated when  Handel  sat  in  his  room  at  Gopsall  and  wrote  the 
Messiah.  Think  of  all  the  forces  which  that  force  has  con- 
trolled, and  think,  also,  how  small  was  the  amount  of  molecu- 
lar disturbance  from  which  it  proceeded.  It  is  as  though  we 
saw  a  conflagration  which  a  spark  had  kindled.  This  is  the 
true  Handel,  who  is  a  more  living  power  among  us  one 
hundred  and  twenty-two  years  after  his  death  than  during 
the  time  he  was  amongst  us  in  the  body. 

ii 

The  whole  life  of  some  people  is  a  kind  of  partial  death — 
a  long,  lingering  death-bed,  so  to  speak,  of  stagnation  and 
nonentity  on  which  death  is  but  the  seal,  or  solemn  signing, 
as  the  abnegation  of  all  further  act  and  deed  on  the  part 


Lord,  What  is  Man?  23 

of  the  signer.  Death  robs  these  people  of  even  that  little 
strength  which  they  appeared  to  have  and  gives  them  nothing 
but  repose. 

On  others,  again,  death  confers  a  more  living  kind  of  life 
than  they  can  ever  possibly  have  enjoyed  while  to  those  about 
them  they  seemed  to  be  alive.  Look  at  Shakespeare;  can 
he  be  properly  said  to  have  lived  in  anything  like  his  real  life 
till  a  hundred  years  or  so  after  his  death?  His  physical  life 
was  but  as  a  dawn  preceding  the  sunrise  of  that  life  of  the 
world  to  come  which  he  was  to  enjoy  hereafter.  True,  there 
was  a  little  stir — a  little  abiding  of  shepherds  in  the  fields, 
keeping  watch  over  their  flocks  by  night — a  little  buzzing  in 
knots  of  men  waiting  to  be  hired  before  the  daybreak — a  little 
stealthy  movement  as  of  a  burglar  or  two  here  and  there — 
an  indication  of  life.  But  the  true  life  of  the  man  was  after 
death  and  not  before  it. 

Death  is  not  more  the  end  of  some  than  it  is  the  beginning 
of  others.  So  he  that  loses  his  soul  may  find  it,  and  he  that 
finds  may  lose  it. 


II 

Elementary  Morality 
The  Foundations  of  Morality 


These  are  like  all  other  foundations ;  if  you  dig  too  much 
about  them  the  superstructure  will  come  tumbling  down. 

ii 

The  foundations  which  we  would  dig  about  and  find  are 
within  us,  like  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  rather  than  without. 

iii 

To  attempt  to  get  at  the  foundations  is  to  try  to  recover 
consciousness  about  things  that  have  passed  into  the  un- 
conscious stage ;  it  is  pretty  sure  to  disturb  and  derange  those 
who  try  it  on  too  much. 

Counsels  of  Imperfection 

It  is  all  very  well  for  mischievous  writers  to  maintain 
that  we  cannot  serve  God  and  Mammon.  Granted  that  it 
is  not  easy,  but  nothing  that  is  worth  doing  ever  is  easy. 
Easy  or  difficult,  possible  or  impossible,  not  only  has  the 
thing  got  to  be  done,  but  it  is  exactly  in  doing  it  that  the 
whole  duty  of  man  consists.  And  when  the  righteous  man 
turneth  away  from  his  righteousness  that  he  hath  committed 
and  doeth  that  which  is  neither  quite  lawful  nor  quite  right, 
he  will  generally  be  found  to  have  gained  in  amiability  what 
he  has  lost  in  holiness. 

If  there  are  two  worlds  at  all  (and  that  there  are  I  have 

24 


Elementary  Morality  25 

no  doubt)  it  stands  to  reason  that  we  ought  to  make  the  best 
of  both  of  them,  and  more  particularly  of  the  one  with  which 
we  are  most  immediately  concerned.  It  is  as  immoral  to  be 
too  good  as  to  be  too  anything  else.  The  Christian  morality 
is  just  as  immoral  as  any  other.  It  is  at  once  very  moral 
and  very  immoral.  How  often  do  we  not  see  children  ruined 
through  the  virtues,  real  or  supposed,  of  their  parents? 
Truly  he  visiteth  the  virtues  of  the  fathers  upon  the  children 
unto  the  third  and  fourth  generation.  The  most  that  can 
be  said  for  virtue  is  that  there  is  a  considerable  bal- 
ance in  its  favour,  and  that  it  is  a  good  deal  better  to  be  for 
it  than  against  it;  but  it  lets  people  in  very  badly  some- 
times. 

If  you  wish  to  understand  virtue  you  must  be  sub-vicious ; 
for  the  really  virtuous  man,  who  is  fully  under  grace, 
will  be  virtuous  unconsciously  and  will  know  nothing 
about  it.  Unless  a  man  is  out-and-out  virtuous  he  is  sub- 
vicious. 

Virtue  is,  as  it  were,  the  repose  of  sleep  or  death.  Vice 
is  the  awakening  to  the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil — without 
which  there  is  no  life  worthy  of  the  name.  Sleep  is,  in  a 
way,  a  happier,  more  peaceful  state  than  waking  and,  in 
a  way,  death  may  be  said  to  be  better  than  life,  but  it  is 
in  a  very  small  way.  We  feel  such  talk  to  be  blasphemy 
against  good  life  and,  whatever  we  may  say  in  death's  favour, 
so  long  as  we  do  not  blow  our  brains  out  we  show  that  we  do 
not  mean  to  be  taken  seriously.  To  know  good,  other  than 
as  a  heavy  sleeper,  we  must  know  vice  also.  There  cannot, 
as  Bacon  said,  be  a  "Hold  fast  that  which  is  good"  without 
a  "Prove  all  things"  going  before  it.  There  is  no  knowledge 
of  good  without  a  knowledge  of  evil  also,  and  this  is  why 
all  nations  have  devils  as  well  as  gods,  and  regard  them  with 
sneaking  kindness.  God  without  the  devil  is  dead,  being 
alone. 

Lucifer 

We  call  him  at  once  the  Angel  of  Light  and  the  Angel  of 
Darkness :  is  this  because  we  instinctively  feel  that  no  one 
can  know  much  till  he  has  sinned  much — or  because  we  feel 
that  extremes  meet,  or  how  ? 


26  Elementary  Morality 


The  Oracle  in  Erewhon 

The  answer  given  by  the  oracle  was  originally  written  con- 
cerning any  vice — say  drunkenness,  but  it  applies  to  many 
another — and  I  wrote  not  "sins"  but  "knows" :  * 

He  who  knows  aught 
Knows  more  than  he  ought ; 
But  he  who  knows  nought 
Has  much  to  be  taught. 


God's  Laws 
The  true  laws  of  God  are  the  laws  of  our  own  well-being. 

Physical  Excellence 

The  question  whether  such  and  such  a  course  of  conduct 
does  or  does  not  do  physical  harm  is  the  safest  test  by  which 
to  try  the  question  whether  it  is  moral  or  no.  If  it  does  no 
harm  to  the  body  we  ought  to  be  very  chary  of  calling  it 
immoral,  while  if  it  tends  towards  physical  excellence  there 
should  be  no  hesitation  in  calling  it  moral.  In  the  case 
of  those  who  are  not  forced  to  over-work  themselves — and 
there  are  many  who  work  themselves  to  death  from  mere 
inability  to  restrain  the  passion  for  work,  which  masters 
them  as  the  craving  for  drink  masters  a  drunkard — over- 
work in  these  cases  is  as  immoral  as  over-eating  or  drinking. 
This,  so  far  as  the  individual  is  concerned.  With  regard 
to  the  body  politic  as  a  whole,  it  is,  no  doubt,  well  that  there 
should  be  some  men  and  women  so  built  that  they  cannot 
be  stopped  from  working  themselves  to  death,  just  as  it  is 
unquestionably  well  that  there  should  be  some  who  cannot 
be  stopped  from  drinking  themselves  to  death,  if  only  that 
they  may  keep  the  horror  of  the  habit  well  in  evidence. 

*  The  two  chapters  entitled  "The  Rights  of  Animals"  and  "The 
Rights  of  Vegetables"  appeared  first  in  the  new  and  revised  edition 
of  Erewhon  1901  and  form  part  of  the  additions  referred  to  in  the 
preface  to  that  book. 


Elementary  Morality  27 

Intellectual  Self-indulgence 

Intellectual  over-indulgence  is  the  most  gratuitous  and  dis- 
graceful form  which  excess  can  take,  nor  is  there  any  the  con- 
sequences of  which  are  more  disastrous. 

Dodging  Fatigue 

When  fatigued,  I  find  it  rests  me  to  write  very  slowly 
with  attention  to  the  formation  of  each  letter.  I  am  often 
thus  able  to  go  on  when  I  could  not  otherwise  do  so. 

Vice  and  Virtue 


Virtue  is  something  which  it  would  be  impossible  to  over- 
rate if  it  had  not  been  over-rated.  The  world  can  ill  spare 
any  vice  which  has  obtained  long  and  largely  among  civilised 
people.  Such  a  vice  must  have  some  good  along  with  its 
deformities.  The  question  "How,  if  every  one  were  to  do 
so  and  so?"  may  be  met  with  another  "How,  if  no  one  were 
to  do  it?"  We  are  a  body  corporate  as  well  as  a  collection 
of  individuals. 

As  a  matter  of  private  policy  I  doubt  whether  the  mod- 
erately vicious  are  more  unhappy  than  the  moderately  virtu- 
ous; "Very  vicious"  is  certainly  less  happy  than  "Toler- 
ably virtuous,"  but  this  is  about  all.  What  pass  muster  as 
the  extremes  of  virtue  probably  make  people  quite  as  unhappy 
as  extremes  of  vice  do. 

The  truest  virtue  has  ever  inclined  toward  excess  rather 
than  asceticism;  that  she  should  do  this  is  reasonable  as 
well  as  observable,  for  virtue  should  be  as  nice  a  calculator 
of  chances  as  other  people  and  will  make  due  allowance  for 
the  chance  of  not  being  found  out.  Virtue  knows  that  it  is 
impossible  to  get  on  without  compromise,  and  tunes  herself, 
as  it  were,  a  trifle  sharp  to  allow  for  an  inevitable  fall  in 
playing.  So  the  Psalmist  says,  "If  thou,  Lord,  wilt  be  ex- 
treme to  mark  what  is  done  amiss :  O  Lord  who  may  abide 
it?"  and  by  this  he  admits  that  the  highest  conceivable  form 
of  virtue  still  leaves  room  for  some  compromise  with  vice. 


28  Elementary  Morality 

So  again  Shakespeare  writes,  "They  say,  best  men  are 
moulded  out  of  faults;  And,  for  the  most,  become  much 
more  the  better  For  being  a  little  bad." 

ii 

The  extremes  of  vice  and  virtue  are  alike  detestable ;  abso- 
lute virtue  is  as  sure  to  kill  a  man  as  absolute  vice  is,  let 
alone  the  dullnesses  of  it  and  the  pomposities  of  it. 

iii 

God  does  not  intend  people,  and  does  not  like  people,  to 
be  too  good.  He  likes  them  neither  too  good  nor  too  bad,  but 
a  little  too  bad  is  more  venial  with  him  than  a  little  too  good. 

iv 

As  there  is  less  difference  than  we  generally  think  between 
the  happiness  of  men  who  seem  to  differ  widely  in  fortune, 
so  is  there  also  less  between  their  moral  natures;  the  best 
are  not  so  much  better  than  the  worst,  nor  the  worst  so 
much  below  the  best  as  we  suppose;  and  the  bad  are  just 
as  important  an  element  in  the  general  progress  as  the  good, 
or  perhaps  more  so.  It  is  in  strife  that  life  lies,  and  were 
there  no  opposing  forces  there  would  be  neither  moral  nor 
immoral,  neither  victory  nor  defeat. 


If  virtue  had  everything  her  own  way  she  would  be  as 
insufferable  as  dominant  factions  generally  are.  It  is  the 
function  of  vice  to  keep  virtue  within  reasonable  bounds. 

vi 

Virtue  has  never  yet  been  adequately  represented  by  any 
who  have  had  any  claim  to  be  considered  virtuous.  It  is 
the  sub-vicious  who  best  understand  virtue.  Let  the  virtuous 
people  stick  to  describing  vice — which  they  can  do  well 
enough. 

My  Virtuous  Life 

I  have  led  a  more  virtuous  life  than  I  intended,  or  thought 
I  was  leading.  When  I  was  young  I  thought  I  was  vicious : 
now  I  know  that  I  was  not  and  that  my  unconscious  know- 


Elementary  Morality  29 

ledge  was  sounder  than  my  conscious.  I  regret  some  things 
that  I  have  done,  but  not  many.  I  regret  that  so  many 
should  think  I  did  much  which  I  never  did,  and  should 
know  of  what  I  did  in  so  garbled  and  distorted  a  fashion  as 
to  have  done  me  much  mischief.  But  if  things  were  known 
as  they  actually  happened,  I  believe  I  should  have  less  to  be 
ashamed  of  than  a  good  many  of  my  neighbours — and  less 
also  to  be  proud  of. 

Sin 

Sin  is  like  a  mountain  with  two  aspects  according  to 
whether  it  is  viewed  before  or  after  it  has  been  reached :  yet 
both  aspects  are  real. 

Morality 

turns  on  whether  the  pleasure  precedes  or  follows  the  pain. 
Thus,  it  is  immoral  to  get  drunk  because  the  headache  comes 
after  the  drinking,  but  if  the  headache  came  first,  and  the 
drunkenness  afterwards,  it  would  be  moral  to  get  drunk. 

Change  and  Immorality 

Every  discovery  and,  indeed,  every  change  of  any  sort 
is  immoral,  as  tending  to  unsettle  men's  minds,  and  hence 
their  custom  and  hence  their  morals,  which  are  the  net 
residuum  of  their  "mores"  or  customs.  Wheref  rom  it  should 
follow  that  there  is  nothing  so  absolutely  moral  as  stagna- 
tion, except  for  this  that,  if  perfect,  it  would  destroy  all 
mores  whatever.  So  there  must  always  be  an  immorality 
in  morality  and,  in  like  manner,  a  morality  in  immorality. 
For  there  will  be  an  element  of  habitual  and  legitimate  cus- 
tom even  in  the  most  unhabitual  and  detestable  things  that 
can  be  done  at  all. 

Cannibalism 

Morality  is  the  custom  of  one's  country  and  the  current 
feeling  of  one's  peers.  Cannibalism  is  moral  in  a  cannibal 
country. 


30  Elementary  Morality 


Abnormal  Developments 

If  a  man  can  get  no  other  food  it  is  more  natural  for  him 
to  kill  another  man  and  eat  him  than  to  starve.  Our  horror 
is  rather  at  the  circumstances  that  make  it  natural  for  the 
man  to  do  this  than  at  the  man  himself.  So  with  other  things 
the  desire  for  which  is  inherited  through  countless  ancestors, 
it  is  more  natural  for  men  to  obtain  the  nearest  thing  they 
can  to  these,  even  by  the  most  abnormal  means  if  the  ordi- 
nary channels  are  closed,  than  to  forego  them  altogether. 
The  abnormal  growth  should  be  regarded  as  disease  but, 
nevertheless,  as  showing  more  health  and  vigour  than  no 
growth  at  all  would  do.  I  said  this  in  Life  and  Habit  (ch.  iii. 
p.  52)  when  I  wrote  "it  is  more  righteous  in  a  man  that  he 
should  eat  strange  food  and  that  his  cheek  so  much  as  lank 
not,  than  that  he  should  starve  if  the  strange  food  be  at  his 
command."  * 

Young  People 

With  regard  to  sexual  matters,  the  best  opinion  of  our 
best  medical  men,  the  practice  of  those  nations  which  have 
proved  most  vigorous  and  comely,  the  evils  that  have  followed 
this  or  that,  the  good  that  has  attended  upon  the  other 
should  be  ascertained  by  men  who,  being  neither  moral  nor 
immoral  and  not  caring  two  straws  what  the  conclusion 
arrived  at  might  be,  should  desire  only  to  get  hold  of  the 
best  available  information.  The  result  should  be  written 
down  with  some  fulness  and  put  before  the  young  of  both 
sexes  as  soon  as  they  are  old  enough  to  understand  such 
matters  at  all.  There  should  be  no  mystery  or  reserve. 
None  but  the  corrupt  will  wish  to  corrupt  facts ;  honest 
people  will  accept  them  eagerly,  whatever  they  may  prove 
to  be,  and  will  convey  them  to  others  as  accurately  as  they 
can.  On  what  pretext  therefore  can  it  be  well  that  knowledge 
should  be  withheld  from  the  universal  gaze  upon  a  matter 

*  On  the  Alps 

It  is  reported  thou  didst  eat  strange  flesh, 

Which  some  did  die  to  look  on:  and  all  this — 

It  wounds  thine  honour  that  I  speak  it  now — 

Was  borne  so  like  a  soldier,  that  thy  cheek 

So  much  as  lank'd  not. — Ant.  &  Chop.,  I.  iv  66-71. 


Elementary  Morality  31 

of  such  universal  interest?  It  cannot  be  pretended  that 
there  is  nothing  to  be  known  on  these  matters  beyond  what 
unaided  boys  and  girls  can  be  left  without  risk  to  find  out 
for  themselves.  Not  one  in  a  hundred  who  remembers  his 
own  boyhood  will  say  this.  How,  then,  are  they  excusable 
who  have  the  care  of  young  people  and  yet  leave  a  matter 
of  such  vital  importance  so  almost  absolutely  to  take  care 
of  itself,  although  they  well  know  how  common  error  is, 
how  easy  to  fall  into  and  how  disastrous  in  its  effects  both 
upon  the  individual  and  the  race? 

Next  to  sexual  matters  there  are  none  upon  which  there 
is  such  complete  reserve  between  parents  and  children  as 
on  those  connected  with  money.  The  father  keeps  his  affairs 
as  closely  as  he  can  to  himself  and  is  most  jealous  of  letting 
his  children  into  a  knowledge  of  how  he  manages  his  money. 
His  children  are  like  monks  in  a  monastery  as  regards  money 
and  he  calls  this  training  them  up  with  the  strictest  regard 
to  principle.  Nevertheless  he  thinks  himself  ill-used  if  his 
son,  on  entering  life,  falls  a  victim  to  designing  persons  whose 
knowledge  of  how  money  is  made  and  lost  is  greater  than  his 
own. 

The  Family 


I  believe  that  more  unhappiness  comes  from  this  source 
than  from  any  other — I  mean  from  the  attempt  to  prolong 
family  connection  unduly  and  to  make  people  hang  together 
artificially  who  would  never  naturally  do  so.  The  mischief 
among  the  lower  classes  is  not  so  great,  but  among  the  middle 
and  upper  classes  it  is  killing  a  large  number  daily.  And  the 
old  people  do  not  really  like  it  much  better  than  the  young. 


On  my  way  down  to  Shrewsbury  some  time  since  I  read 
the  Bishop  of  Carlisle's  Walks  in  the  Regions  of  Science  and 
Faith*  then  just  published,  and  found  the  following  on  p.  129 
in  the  essay  which  is  entitled  "Man's  Place  in  Nature." 
After  saying  that  young  sparrows  or  robins  soon  lose  sight 

*  Walks  in  the  Regions  of  Science  and  Faith,  by  Harvey  Goodwin, 
D.D.,  Lord  Bishop  of  Carlisle.  John  Murray,  1883. 


32  Elementary  Morality 

of  their  fellow-nestlings  and  leave  off  caring  for  them,  the 
bishop  continues : — 

"Whereas  'children  of  one  family'  are  constantly  found 
joined  together  by  a  love  which  only  grows  with  years,  and 
they  part  for  their  posts  of  duty  in  the  world  with  the 
hope  of  having  joyful  meetings  from  time  to  time,  and  of 
meeting  in  a  higher  world  when  their  life  on  earth  is  finished." 

I  am  sure  my  great-grandfather  did  not  look  forward  to 
meeting  his  father  in  heaven — his  father  had  cut  him  out 
of  his  will;  nor  can  I  credit  my  grandfather  with  any  great 
longing  to  rejoin  my  great-grandfather — a  worthy  man 
enough,  but  one  with  whom  nothing  ever  prospered.  I 
am  certain  my  father,  after  he  was  40,  did  not  wish  to  see 
my  grandfather  any  more — indeed,  long  before  reaching  that 
age  he  had  decided  that  Dr.  Butler's  life  should  not  be  written, 
though  R.  W.  Evans  would  have  been  only  too  glad  to  write 
it.  Speaking  for  myself,  I  have  no  wish  to  see  my  father 
again,  and  I  think  it  likely  that  the  Bishop  of  Carlisle  would 
not  be  more  eager  to  see  his  than  I  mine. 

Unconscious  Humour 

"Writing  to  the  Hon.  Mrs.  Watson  in  1856,  Charles  Dick- 
ens says :  'I  have  always  observed  within  my  experience  that 
the  men  who  have  left  home  very  young  have,  many  long  years 
afterwards,  had  the  tenderest  regard  for  it.  That's  a  pleasant 
thing  to  think  of  as  one  of  the  wise  adjustments  of  this  life 
of  ours.' "  * 

Homer's  Odyssey 

From  the  description  of  the  meeting  between  Ulysses 
and  Telemachus  it  is  plain  that  Homer  considered  it  quite 
as  dreadful  for  relations  who  had  long  been  separated  to 
come  together  again  as  for  them  to  separate  in  the  first 
instance.  And  this  is  about  true.f 

*  This  quotation  occurs  on  the  title  page  of  Charles  Dickens  and 
Rochester  by  Robert  Langton.  Chapman  &  Hall,  1880.  Reprinted 
with  additions  from  the  Papers  of  the  Manchester  Literary  Club, 
Vol.  VI,  1880.  But  the  italics  are  Butler's. 

t  This  is  Butler's  note  as  he  left  it  He  made  it  just  about  the 
time  he  hit  upon  the  theory  that  the  Odyssey  was  written  by  a  woman. 
If  it  had  caught  his  eye  after  that  theory  had  become  established  in 


Elementary  Morality  33 


Melchisedec 

He  was  a  really  happy  man.  He  was  without  father,  with- 
out mother  and  without  descent.  He  was  an  incarnate  bach- 
elor. He  was  a  born  orphan. 

Bacon  for  Breakfast 

Now  [1893]  when  I  am  abroad,  being  older  and  taking 
less  exercise,  I  do  not  want  any  breakfast  beyond  coffee 
and  bread  and  butter,  but  when  this  note  was  written  [1880] 
I  liked  a  modest  rasher  of  bacon  in  addition,  and  used  to 
notice  the  jealous  indignation  with  which  heads  of  families 
who  enjoyed  the  privilege  of  Cephas  and  the  brethren  of 
our  Lord  regarded  it.  There  were  they  with  three  or  four 
elderly  unmarried  daughters  as  well  as  old  mamma — how 
could  they  afford  bacon  ?  And  there  was  I,  a  selfish  bachelor — . 
The  appetising,  savoury  smell  of  my  rasher  seemed  to  drive 
them  mad.  I  used  to  feel  very  uncomfortable,  very  small 
and  quite  aware  how  low  it  was  of  me  to  have  bacon  for 
breakfast  and  no  daughters  instead  of  daughters  and  no 
bacon.  But  when  I  consulted  the  oracles  of  heaven  about 
it,  I  was  always  told  to  stick  to  my  bacon  and  not  to  make 
a  fool  of  myself.  I  despised  myself  but  have  not  withered 
under  my  own  contempt  so  completely  as  I  ought  to  have 
done. 

God  and  Man 

To  love  God  is  to  have  good  health,  good  looks,  good  sense, 
experience,  a  kindly  nature  and  a  fair  balance  of  cash  in 
hand.  "We  know  that  all  things  work  together  for  good  to 
them  that  love  God."  To  be  loved  by  God  is  the  same  as 
to  love  Him.  We  love  Him  because  He  first  loved  us. 

The  Homeric  Deity  and  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette 

A  writer  in  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette  (I  think  in  1874  or  1875, 
and  in  the  autumn  months,  but  I  cannot  now  remember) 

his  mind,  he  would  have  edited  it  so  as  to  avoid  speaking  of  Homer  as 
the  author  of  the  poem. 


34  Elementary  Morality 

summed  up  Homer's  conception  of  a  god  as  that  of  a  "super- 
latively strong,  amorous,  beautiful,  brave  and  cunning  man/ 
This  is  pretty  much  what  a  good  working  god  ought  to  be, 
but  he  should  also  be  kind  and  have  a  strong  sense  of  humour, 
together  with  a  contempt  for  the  vices  of  meanness  and 
for  the  meannesses  of  virtue.  After  saying  what  I  have 
quoted  above  the  writer  in  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette  goes  on, 
"An  impartial  critic  can  judge  for  himself  how  far,  if  at  all, 
this  is  elevated  above  the  level  of  mere  fetish  worship." 
Perhaps  it  is  that  I  am  not  an  impartial  critic,  but,  if  I  am 
allowed  to  be  so,  I  should  say  that  the  elevation  above  mere 
fetish  worship  was  very  considerable. 

Good  Breeding  the  Summum  Bonum 

When  people  ask  what  faith  we  would  substitute  for  that 
which  we  would  destroy,  we  answer  that  we  destroy  no  faith 
and  need  substitute  none.  We  hold  the  glory  of  God  to  be 
the  summum  bonum,  and  so  do  Christians  generally.  It  is 
on  the  question  of  what  is  the  glory  of  God  that  we  join 
issue.  We  say  it  varies  with  the  varying  phases  of  God  as 
made  manifest  in  his  works,  but  that,  so  far  as  we  are  our- 
selves concerned,  the  glory  of  God  is  best  advanced  by  ad- 
vancing that  of  man.  If  asked  what  is  the  glory  of  man  we 
answer  "Good  breeding" — using  the  words  in  their  double 
sense  and  meaning  both  the  continuance  of  the  race  and  that 
grace  of  manner  which  the  words  are  more  commonly  taken 
to  signify.  The  double  sense  of  the  words  is  all  the  more 
significant  for  the  unconsciousness  with  which  it  is  passed 
over. 

Advice  to  the  Young 

You  will  sometimes  find  your  elders  laying  their  heads 
together  and  saying  what  a  bad  thing  it  is  for  young  men 
to  come  into  a  little  money — that  those  always  do  best 
who  have  no  expectancy,  and  the  like.  They  will  then  quote 
some  drivel  from  one  of  the  Kingsleys  about  the  deadening 
effect  an  income  of  £300  a  year  will  have  upon  a  man.  Avoid 
any  one  whom  you  may  hear  talk  in  this  way.  The  fault 
lies  not  with  the  legacy  (which  would  certainly  be  better 
if  there  were  more  of  it)  but  with  those  who  have  so  mis- 


Elementary  Morality  35 

managed  our  education  that  we  go  in  even  greater  danger 
of  losing  the  money  than  other  people  are. 

Religion 

Is  there  any  religion  whose  followers  can  be  pointed  to 
as  distinctly  more  amiable  and  trustworthy  than  those  of 
any  other?  If  so,  this  should  be  enough.  I  find  the  nicest 
and  best  people  generally  profess  no  religion  at  all,  but  are 
ready  to  like  the  best  men  of  all  religions. 

Heaven  and  Hell 

Heaven  is  the  work  of  the  best  and  kindest  men  and  women. 
Hell  is  the  work  of  prigs,  pedants  and  professional  truth- 
tellers.  The  world  is  an  attempt  to  make  the  best  of  both. 

Priggishness 

The  essence  of  priggishness  is  setting  up  to  be  better 
than  one's  neighbour.  Better  may  mean  more  virtuous,  more 
clever,  more  agreeable  or  what  not.  The  worst  of  it  is  that 
one  cannot  do  anything  outside  eating  one's  dinner  or  tak- 
ing a  walk  without  setting  up  to  know  more  than  one's 
neighbours.  It  was  this  that  made  me  say  in  Life  and 
Habit  [close  of  ch.  ii.]  that  I  was  among  the  damned  in 
that  I  wrote  at  all.  So  I  am;  and  I  am  often  very  sorry 
that  I  was  never  able  to  reach  those  more  saintly  classes 
who  do  not  set  up  as  instructors  of  other  people.  But  one 
must  take  one's  lot. 

Lohengrin 

He  was  a  prig.  In  the  bedroom  scene  with  Elsa  he  should 
have  said  that  her  question  put  him  rather  up  a  tree  but  that, 
as  she  wanted  to  know  who  he  was,  he  would  tell  her  and 
would  let  the  Holy  Grail  slide. 

Swells 

People  ask  complainingly  what  swells  have  done,  or  do, 
for  society  that  they  should  be  able  to  live  without  working. 
The  good  swell  is  the  creature  towards  which  all  nature  has 


36  Elementary  Morality 

been  groaning  and  travailing  together  until  now.  He  is  an 
ideal.  He  shows  what  may  be  done  in  the  way  of  good  breed- 
ing, health,  looks,  temper  and  fortune.  He  realises  men's 
dreams  of  themselves,  at  any  rate  vicariously.  He  preaches 
the  gospel  of  grace.  The  world  is  like  a  spoilt  child,  it  has 
this  good  thing  given  it  at  great  expense  and  then  says  it  is 
useless ! 

Science  and  Religion 

These  are  reconciled  in  amiable  and  sensible  people  but 
nowhere  else. 

Gentleman 

If  we  are  asked  what  is  the  most  essential  characteristic 
that  underlies  this  word,  the  word  itself  will  guide  us  to 
gentleness,  to  absence  of  such  things  as  brow-beating,  over- 
bearing manners  and  fuss,  and  generally  to  consideration  for 
other  people. 

The  Finest  Men 

I  suppose  an  Italian  peasant  or  a  Breton,  Norman  or 
English  fisherman,  is  about  the  best  thing  nature  does  in 
the  way  of  men — the  richer  and  the  poorer  being  alike  mis- 
takes. 

On  being  a  Swell  all  Round 

I  have  never  in  my  life  succeeded  in  being  this.  Some- 
times I  get  a  new  suit  and  am  tidy  for  a  while  in  part,  mean- 
while the  hat,  tie,  boots,  gloves  and  underclothing  all  clamour 
for  attention  and,  before  I  have  got  them  well  in  hand,  the 
new  suit  has  lost  its  freshness.  Still,  if  ever  I  do  get  any 
money,  I  will  try  and  make  myself  really  spruce  all  round 
till  I  find  out,  as  I  probably  shall  in  about  a  week,  that  if 
I  give  my  clothes  an  inch  they  will  take  an  ell.  [1880.] 

Money 

is  the  last  enemy  that  shall  never  be  subdued.  While  there 
is  flesh  there  is  money — or  the  want  of  money;  but  money 
is  always  on  the  brain  so  long  as  there  is  a  brain  in  reasonable 
order. 


Elementary  Morality  37 


A  Luxurious  Death 

Death  in  anything  like  luxury  is  one  of  the  most  expensive 
things  a  man  can  indulge  himself  in.  It  costs  a  lot  of  money 
to  die  comfortably,  unless  one  goes  off  pretty  quickly. 

Money,  Health  and  Reputation 

Money,  if  it  live  at  all,  that  is  to  say  if  it  be  reproductive 
and  put  out  at  any  interest,  however  low,  is  mortal  and 
doomed  to  be  lost  one  day,  though  it  may  go  on  living  through 
many  generations  of  one  single  family  if  it  be  taken  care  of. 
No  man  is  absolutely  safe.  It  may  be  said  to  any  man, 
"Thou  fool,  this  night  thy  money  shall  be  required  of  thee." 
And  reputation  is  like  money :  it  may  be  required  of  us  with- 
out warning.  The  little  unsuspected  evil  on  which  we  trip 
may  swell  up  in  a  moment  and  prove  to  be  the  huge,  Janus- 
like  mountain  of  unpardonable  sin.  And  his  health  may  be 
required  of  any  fool,  any  night  or  any  day. 

A  man  will  feel  loss  of  money  more  keenly  than  loss  of 
bodily  health,  so  long  as  he  can  keep  his  money.  Take  his 
money  away  and  deprive  him  of  the  means  of  earning  any 
more,  and  his  health  will  soon  break  up ;  but  leave  him  his 
money  and,  even  though  his  health  breaks  up  and  he  dies, 
he  does  not  mind  it  so  much  as  we  think.  Money  losses  are 
the  worst,  loss  of  health  is  next  worst  and  loss  of  reputation 
comes  in  a  bad  third.  All  other  things  are  amusements 
provided  money,  health  and  good  name  are  untouched. 


Solicitors 

A  man  must  not  think  he  can  save  himself  the  trouble 
of  being  a  sensible  man  and  a  gentleman  by  going  to  his 
solicitor,  any  more  than  he  can  get  himself  a  sound  consti- 
tution by  going  to  his  doctor;  but  a  solicitor  can  do  more 
to  keep  a  tolerably  well-meaning  fool  straight  than  a  doctor 
can  do  for  an  invalid.  Money  is  to  the  solicitor  what  souls 
are  to  the  parson  or  life  to  the  physician.  He  is  our  money- 
doctor. 


38  Elementary  Morality 


Doctors 

Going  to  your  doctor  is  having  such  a  row  with  your  cells 
that  you  refer  them  to  your  solicitor.  Sometimes  you,  as  it 
were,  strike  against  them  and  stop  their  food,  when  they  go 
on  strike  against  yourself.  Sometimes  you  file  a  bill  in 
Chancery  against  them  and  go  to  bed. 

Priests 

We  may  find  an  argument  in  favour  of  priests  if  we  con- 
sider whether  man  is  capable  of  doing  for  himself  in  respect 
of  his  moral  and  spiritual  welfare  (than  which  nothing  can 
be  more  difficult  and  intricate)  what  it  is  so  clearly  better  for 
him  to  leave  to  professional  advisers  in  the  case  of  his  money 
and  his  body  which  are  comparatively  simple  and  unim- 
portant. 


Ill 

The  Germs  of  Erewhon  and  of  Life 
and  Habit 


Prefatory  Note 

THE  Origin  of  Species  was  published  in  the  autumn  of  1859, 
and  Butler  arrived  in  New  Zealand  about  the  same  time  and 
read  the  book  soon  afterwards.  In  1880  he  wrote  in  Uncon- 
scious Memory  (close  of  Chapter  I}:  "As  a  member  of  the 
general  public,  at  that  time  residing  eighteen  miles  from  the 
nearest  human  habitation,  and  three  days'  journey  on  horse- 
back from  a  bookseller's  shop,  I  became  one  of  Mr.  Darwin's 
many  enthusiastic  admirers,  and  wrote  a  philosophic  dialogue 
(the  most  offensive  form,  except  poetry  and  books  of  travel 
into  supposed  unknown  countries,  that  even  literature  can 
assume}  upon  the  Origin  of  Species.  This  production  ap- 
peared in  the  Press,  Canterbury,  New  Zealand,  in  1861  or 
1862,  but  I  have  long  lost  the  only  copy  I  had." 

The  Press  was  founded  by  James  Edward  FitsGerald,  the 
first  Superintendent  of  the  Province  of  Canterbury.  Butler 
was  an  intimate*  friend  of  FitsGerald,  was  closely  associated 
with  the  newspaper  and  frequently  wrote  for  it.  The  first 
number  appeared  2$th  May,  1861,  and  on  2$th  May,  191 1,  the 
Press  celebrated  its  jubilee  with  a  number  which  contained 
particulars  of  its  early  life,  of  its  editors,  and  of  Butler;  it  also 
contained  reprints  of  two  of  Butler's  contributions,  vis.  Dar- 
win among  the  Machines,  which  originally  appeared  in  its  col- 
umns 13  June,  1863,  and  Lucub ratio  Ebria,  which  originally 
appeared  29  July,  1865.  The  Dialogue  was  not  reprinted 
because,  although  the  editor  knew  of  its  existence  and  searched 
for  it,  he  could  not  find  it.  At  my  request,  after  the  appear- 

39 


40  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

ance  of  the  jubilee  number,  a  further  search  was  made,  but 
the  Dialogue  was  not  found  and  I  gave  it  Ufa  for  lost. 

In  March,  1912,  Mr.  R.  A.  Streatfeild  pointed  out  to  me 
that  Mr.  Tregaskis,  in  Holborn,  was  advertising  for  sale  an 
autograph  letter  by  Charles  Darwin  sending  to  an  unknown 
editor  a  Dialogue  on  Species  from  a  New  Zealand  newspaper, 
described  in  the  letter  as  being  "remarkable  from  its  spirit  and 
from  giving  so  clear  and  accurate  a  view  of  Mr.  D.'s  theory." 
Having  no  doubt  that  this  referred  to  Butler's  lost  contribu- 
tion to  the  Press,  I  bought  the  autograph  letter  and  sent  it  to 
New  Zealand,  where  it  now  is  in  the  Canterbury  Museum, 
Christchurch.  With  it  I  sent  a  letter  to  the  editor  of  the 
Press,  giving  all  further  information  in  my  possession  about 
the  Dialogue.  This  letter,  which  appeared  I  June,  1912,  to- 
gether with  the  presentation  of  Darwin's  autograph,  stimu- 
lated further  search,  and  in  the  issue  for  2Oth  December,  1862, 
the  Dialogue  was  found  by  Miss  Colborne-Veel,  whose  father 
was  editor  of  the  paper  at  the  time  Butler  was  writing  for  it. 
The  Press  reprinted  the  Dialogue  8th  June,  1912. 

When  the  Dialogue  first  appeared  it  excited  a  great  deal  of 
discussion  in  the  colony  and,  to  quote  Butler's  words  in  a  letter 
to  Darwin  (1865),  "called  forth  a  contemptuous  rejoinder 
from,  (I  believe)  the  Bishop  of  Wellington."  This  rejoinder 
was  an  article  headed  "Barrel-Organs,"  the  idea  being  that 
there  was  nothing  new  in  Darwin's  book,  it  was  only  a  grind- 
ing out  of  old  tunes  with  which  we  were  all  familiar.  Butler 
alludes  to  this  controversy  in  a  note  made  on  a  letter  from 
Darwin  which  he  gave  to  the  British  Museum.  "I  remember 
answering  an  attack  (in  the  Press,  New  Zealand)  on  me  by 
Bishop  Abraham,  of  Wellington,  as  though  I  were  someone  else, 
and,  to  keep  up  the  deception,  attacking  myself  also.  But  it  was 
all  very  young  and  silly."  The  bishop's  article  and  Butler's 
reply,  which  was  a  letter  signed  A.  M.  and  some  of  the  result- 
ing correspondence  were  reprinted  in  thePress,  i$th  June,  1912. 

At  first  I  thought  of  including  here  the  Dialogue,  and  per- 
haps the  letter  signed  A.  M.  They  are  interesting  as  showing 
that  Butler  was  among  the  earliest  to  study  closely  the  Origin 
of  Species,  and  also  as  showing  the  state  of  his  mind  before  he 
began  to  think  for  himself,  before  he  wrote  Darwin  among  the 
Machines  from  which  so  much  followed;  but  they  can  hardly 
be  properly  considered  as  germs  of  Erewhon  and  Life  and 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  41 

Habit.  They  rather  show  the  preparation  of  the  soil  in  which 
those  germs  sprouted  and  grew;  and,  remembering  his  last 
remark  on  the  subject  that  "it  was  all  very  young  and  silly," 
I  decided  to  omit  them.  The  Dialogue  is  no  longer  lost,  and 
the  numbers  of  the  Press  containing  it  and  the  correspondence 
that  ensued  can  be  seen  in  the  British  Museum. 

Butler's  other  two  contributions  to  the  Press  mentioned 
above  do  contain  the  germs  of  the  machine  chapters  in  Ere- 
whon,  and  led  him  to  the  theory  put  forward  in  Life  and 
Habit.  In  1901  he  wrote  in  the  preface  to  the  new  and  re- 
vised edition  of  Erewhon :  "The  first  part  of  Erewhon  writ- 
ten was  an  article  headed  Darwin  among  the  Machines  and 
signed  'Cellarius.'  It  was  written  in  the  Upper  Rangitata  dis- 
trict of  Canterbury  Province  (as  it  then  was}  of  New  Zea- 
land, and  appeared  at  Christchurch  in  the  Press  newspaper, 
June  13,  1863.  A  copy  of  this  article  is  indexed  under  my 
books  in  the  British  Museum  catalogue." 

The  article  is  in  the  form  of  a  letter,  and  the  copy  spoken  of 
by  Butler,  as  indexed  under  his  name  in  the  British  Museum, 
being  defective,  the  reprint  which  appeared  in  the  jubilee 
number  of  the  Press  has  been  used  in  completing  the  version 
which  follows. 

Further  on  in  the  preface  to  the  1901  edition  of  Erewhon 
he  writes:  "A  second  article  on  the  same  subject  as  the  one 
just  referred  to  appeared  in  the  Press  shortly  after  the  first, 
but  I  have  no  copy.  It  treated  machines  from  a  different 
point  of  view  and  was  the  basis  of  pp.  270-274  of  the  present 
edition  of  Erewhon.  This  view  ultimately  led  me  to  the 
theory  I  put  forward  in  Life  and  Habit,  published  in  Novem- 
ber, 1877.*  /  have  put  a  bare  outline  of  this  theory  (which  I 
believe  to  be  quite  sound)  into  the  mouth  of  an  Erewhonian 
professor  in  Chapter  XXVII  of  this  book." 

This  second  article  was  Lucubratio  Ebria,  and  was  sent  by 
Butler  from  England  to  the  editor  of  the  Press  in  1865,  with 
a  letter  from  which  this  is  an  extract: 

"I  send  you  an  article  which  you  can  give  to  FitzGerald 
or  not,  just  as  you  think  it  most  expedient — for  him.  Is  not 
the  subject  worked  out,  and  are  not  the  Canterbury  people 
tired  of  Darwinism?  For  me — is  it  an  article  to  my  credit?  I 

*  Life  and  Habit  is  dated  1878,  but  it  actually  appeared  on  Butler's 
birthday,  4th  December,  1877. 


42  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

do  not  send  it  to  FitzGerald  because  I  am  sure  he  would  put  it 
into  the  paper.  .  .  .  I  know  the  undue  lenience  which  he 
lends  to  my  performances,  and  believe  you  to  be  the  sterner 
critic  of  the  two.  That  there  are  some  good  things  in  it  you 
will,  I  think,  feel;  but  I  am  almost  sure  that  considering  usque 
ad  nauseam,  etc.,  you  will  think  it  had  better  not  appear.  .  .  . 
I  think  you  and  he  will  like  that  sentence:  'There  was  a 
moral  government  of  the  world  before  man  came  into  it.' 
There  is  hardly  a  sentence  in  it  written  without  deliberation; 
but  I  need  hardly  say  that  it  was  done  upon  tea,  not  upon 
whiskey.  .  .  . 

"PS.  If  you  are  in  any  doubt  about  the  expediency  of  the 
article  take  it  to  M. 

"P. PS.     Perhaps  better  take  it  to  him  anyhow." 

The  preface  to  the  1901  edition  of  Erewhon  contains  some 
further  particulars  of  the  genesis  of  that  work,  and  there  are 
still  further  particulars  in  Unconscious  Memory,  Chapter  II, 
"How  I  wrote  Life  and  Habit." 

The  first  tentative  sketch  of  the  Life  and  Habit  theory  oc- 
curs in  the  letter  to  Thomas  William  Gale  Butler  which  is 
given  post.  This  T.  W .  G.  Butler  was  not  related  to  Butler, 
they  met  first  as  art-students  at  Heatherley's,  and  Butler  used 
to  speak  of  him  as  the  most  brilliant  man  he  had  ever  known. 
He  died  many  years  ago.  He  was  the  writer  of  the  "letter 
from  a  friend  now  in  New  Zealand,"  from  which  a  quotation 
is  given  in  Life  and  Habit,  Chapter  V  (pp.  83,  84).  Butler 
kept  a  copy  of  his  letter  to  T.W.G.  Butler,  but  it  was  imper- 
fectly pressed;  he  afterwards  supplied  some  of  the  missing 
words  from  memory,  and  gave  it  to  the  British  Museum. 

Darwin  among  the  Machines 

[To  the  Editor  of  the  Press,  Christchurch,  New  Zealand — 
13  June,  1863.] 

Sir — There  are  few  things  of  which  the  present  generation 
is  more  justly  proud  than  of  the  wonderful  improvements 
which  are  daily  taking  place  in  all  sorts  of  mechanical  appli- 
ances. And  indeed  it  is  matter  for  great  congratulation  on 
many  grounds.  It  is  unnecessary  to  mention  these  here, 
for  they  are  sufficiently  obvious;  our  present  business  lies 
with  considerations  which  may  somewhat  tend  to  humble 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  43 

our  pride  and  to  make  us  think  seriously  of  the  future  pros- 
pects of  the  human  race.  If  we  revert  to  the  earliest  primor- 
dial types  of  mechanical  life,  to  the  lever,  the  wedge,  the 
inclined  plane,  the  screw  and  the  pulley,  or  (for  analogy 
would  lead  us  one  step  further)  to  that  one  primordial  type 
from  which  all  the  mechanical  kingdom  has  been  developed, 
we  mean  to  the  lever  itself,  and  if  we  then  examine  the 
machinery  of  the  Great  Eastern,  we  find  ourselves  almost 
awestruck  at  the  vast  development  of  the  mechanical  world, 
at  the  gigantic  strides  with  which  it  has  advanced  in  com- 
parison with  the  slow  progress  of  the  animal  and  vegetable 
kingdom.  We  shall  find  it  impossible  to  refrain  from  asking 
ourselves  what  the  end  of  this  mighty  movement  is  to  be. 
In  what  direction  is  it  tending?  What  will  be  its  upshot? 
To  give  a  few  imperfect  hints  towards  a  solution  of  these 
questions  is  the  object  of  the  present  letter. 

We  have  used  the  words  "mechanical  life,"  "the  mechani- 
cal kingdom,"  "the  mechanical  world"  and  so  forth,  and 
we  have  done  so  advisedly,  for  as  the  vegetable  king- 
dom was  slowly  developed  from  the  mineral,  and  as,  in 
like  manner,  the  animal  supervened  upon  the  vegetable,  so 
now,  in  these  last  few  ages,  an  entirely  new  kingdom  has 
sprung  up  of  which  we  as  yet  have  only  seen  what  will 
one  day  be  considered  the  antediluvian  prototypes  of  the 
race. 

We  regret  deeply  that  our  knowledge  both  of  natural  his- 
tory and  of  machinery  is  too  small  to  enable  us  to  under- 
take the  gigantic  task  of  classifying  machines  into  the  genera 
and  sub-genera,  species,  varieties  and  sub-varieties,  and  so 
forth,  of  tracing  the  connecting  links  between  machines  of 
widely  different  characters,  of  pointing  out  how  subservience 
to  the  use  of  man  has  played  that  part  among  machines 
which  natural  selection  has  performed  in  the  animal  and  vege- 
table kingdom,  of  pointing  out  rudimentary  organs  [see 
note]  which  exist  in  some  few  machines,  feebly  developed 
and  perfectly  useless,  yet  serving  to  mark  descent  from  some 
ancestral  type  which  has  either  perished  or  been  modified 
into  some  new  phase  of  mechanical  existence.  We  can  only 
point  out  this  field  for  investigation;  it  must  be  followed  by 
others  whose  education  and  talents  have  been  of  a  much 
higher  order  than  any  which  we  can  lay  claim  to. 


44  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

Some  few  hints  we  have  determined  to  venture  upon, 
though  we  do  so  with  the  profoundest  diffidence.  Firstly  we 
would  remark  that  as  some  of  the  lowest  of  the  vertebrata 
attained  a  far  greater  size  than  has  descended  to  their  more 
highly  organised  living  representatives,  so  a  diminution  in 
the  size  of  machines  has  often  attended  their  development 
and  progress.  Take  the  watch  for  instance.  Examine  the 
beautiful  structure  of  the  little  animal,  watch  the  intelligent 
play  of  the  minute  members  which  compose  it;  yet  this 
little  creature  is  but  a  development  of  the  cumbrous  clocks 
of  the  thirteenth  century — it  is  no  deterioration  from  them. 
The  day  may  come  when  clocks,  which  certainly  at  the 
present  day  are  not  diminishing  in  bulk,  may  be  entirely 
superseded  by  the  universal  use  of  watches,  in  which  case 
clocks  will  become  extinct  like  the  earlier  saurians,  while  the 
watch  (whose  tendency  has  for  some  years  been  rather  to 
decrease  in  size  than  the  contrary)  will  remain  the  only 
existing  type  of  an  extinct  race. 

The  views  of  machinery  which  we  are  thus  feebly  indi- 
cating will  suggest  the  solution  of  one  of  the  greatest  and 
most  mysterious  questions  of  the  day.  We  refer  to  the 
question :  What  sort  of  creature  man's  next  successor  in  the 
supremacy  of  the  earth  is  likely  to  be.  We  have  often  heard 
this  debated;  but  it  appears  to  us  that  we  are  ourselves 
creating  our  own  successors;  we  are  daily  adding  to  the 
beauty  and  delicacy  of  their  physical  organisation;  we  are 
daily  giving  them  greater  power  and  supplying,  by  all  sorts 
of  ingenious  contrivances,  that  self-regulating,  self-acting 
power  which  will  be  to  them  what  intellect  has  been  to  the 
human  race.  In  the  course  of  ages  we  shall  find  ourselves 
the  inferior  race.  Inferior  in  power,  inferior  in  that  moral 
quality  of  self-control,  we  shall  look  up  to  them  as  the  acme 
of  all  that  the  best  and  wisest  man  can  ever  dare  to  aim  at. 
No  evil  passions,  no  jealousy,  no  avarice,  no  impure  desires 
will  disturb  the  serene  might  of  those  glorious  creatures. 
Sin,  shame  and  sorrow  will  have  no  place  among  them. 
Their  minds  will  be  in  a  state  of  perpetual  calm,  the  content- 
ment of  a  spirit  that  knows  no  wants,  is  disturbed  by  no 
regrets.  Ambition  will  never  torture  them.  Ingratitude  will 
never  cause  them  the  uneasiness  of  a  moment.  The  guilty 
conscience,  the  hope  deferred,  the  pains  of  exile,  the  insolence 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  45 

of  office  and  the  spurns  that  patient  merit  of  the  unworthy 
takes — these  will  be  entirely  unknown  to  them.  If  they 
want  "feeding"  (by  the  use  of  which  very  word  we  betray 
our  recognition  of  them  as  living  organism)  they  will  be 
attended  by  patient  slaves  whose  business  and  interest  it 
will  be  to  see  that  they  shall  want  for  nothing.  If  they  are 
out  of  order  they  will  be  promptly  attended  to  by  physicians 
who  are  thoroughly  acquainted  with  their  constitutions;  if 
they  die,  for  even  these  glorious  animals  will  not  be  exempt 
from  that  necessary  and  universal  consummation,  they  will 
immediately  enter  into  a  new  phase  of  existence,  for  what 
machine  dies  entirely  in  every  part  at  one  and  the  same 
instant  ? 

We  take  it  that  when  the  state  of  things  shall  have  arrived 
which  we  have  been  above  attempting  to  describe,  man  will 
have  become  to  the  machine  what  the  horse  and  the  dog  are 
to  man.  He  will  continue  to  exist,  nay  even  to  improve, 
and  will  be  probably  better  off  in  his  state  of  domestication 
under  the  beneficent  rule  of  the  machines  than  he  is  in  his 
present  wild  state.  We  treat  our  horses,  dogs,  cattle  and 
sheep,  on  the  whole,  with  great  kindness,  we  give  them  what- 
ever experience  teaches  us  to  be  best  for  them,  and  there  can 
be  no  doubt  that  our  use  of  meat  has  added  to  the  happiness 
of  the  lower  animals  far  more  than  it  has  detracted  from  it ; 
in  like  manner  it  is  reasonable  to  suppose  that  the  machines 
will  treat  us  kindly,  for  their  existence  is  as  dependent  upon 
ours  as  ours  is  upon  the  lower  animals.  They  cannot  kill  us 
and  eat  us  as  we  do  sheep,  they  will  not  only  require  our 
services  in  the  parturition  of  their  young  (which  branch  of 
their  economy  will  remain  always  in  our  hands)  but  also  in 
feeding  them,  in  setting  them  right  if  they  are  sick,  and  bury- 
ing their  dead  or  working  up  their  corpses  into  new  ma- 
chines. It  is  obvious  that  if  all  the  animals  in  Great  Britain 
save  man  alone  were  to  die,  and  if  at  the  same  time  all 
intercourse  with  foreign  countries  were  by  some  sudden  catas- 
trophe to  be  rendered  perfectly  impossible,  it  is  obvious  that 
under  such  circumstances  the  loss  of  human  life  would  be 
something  fearful  to  contemplate — in  like  manner,  were  man- 
kind to  cease,  the  machines  would  be  as  bady  off  or  even 
worse.  The  fact  is  that  our  interests  are  inseparable  from 
theirs,  and  theirs  from  ours.  Each  race  is  dependent  upon 


46  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

the  other  for  innumerable  benefits,  and,  until  the  reproduc- 
tive organs  of  the  machines  have  been  developed  in  a  manner 
which  we  are  hardly  yet  able  to  conceive,  they  are  entirely 
dependent  upon  man  for  even  the  continuance  of  their  species. 
It  is  true  that  these  organs  may  be  ultimately  developed, 
inasmuch  as  man's  interest  lies  in  that  direction;  there  is 
nothing  which  our  infatuated  race  would  desire  more  than 
to  see  a  fertile  union  between  two  steam  engines ;  it  is  true 
that  machinery  is  even  at  this  present  time  employed  in 
begetting  machinery,  in  becoming  the  parent  of  machines 
often  after  its  own  kind,  but  the  days  of  flirtation,  courtship 
and  matrimony  appear  to  be  very  remote  and  indeed  can 
hardly  be  realised  by  our  feeble  and  imperfect  imagination. 

Day  by  day,  however,  the  machines  are  gaining  ground 
upon  us ;  day  by  day  we  are  becoming  more  subservient  to 
them;  more  men  are  daily  bound  down  as  slaves  to  tend 
them,  more  men  are  daily  devoting  the  energies  of  their 
whole  lives  to  the  development  of  mechanical  life.  The 
upshot  is  simply  a  question  of  time,  but  that  the  time  will 
come  when  the  machines  will  hold  the  real  supremacy  over 
the  world  and  its  inhabitants  is  what  no  person  of  a  truly 
philosophic  mind  can  for  a  moment  question. 

Our  opinion  is  that  war  to  the  death  should  be  instantly 
proclaimed  against  them.  Every  machine  of  every  sort 
should  be  destroyed  by  the  well-wisher  of  his  species.  Let 
there  be  no  exceptions  made,  no  quarter  shown ;  let  us  at 
once  go  back  to  the  primeval  condition  of  the  race.  If  it  be 
urged  that  this  is  impossible  under  the  present  condition  of 
human  affairs,  this  at  once  proves  that  the  mischief  is  already 
done,  that  our  servitude  has  commenced  in  good  earnest, 
that  we  have  raised  a  race  of  beings  whom  it  is  beyond  our 
power  to  destroy  and  that  we  are  not  only  enslaved  but  are 
absolutely  acquiescent  in  our  bondage. 

For  the  present  we  shall  leave  this  subject  which  we 
present  gratis  to  the  members  of  the  Philosophical  Society. 
Should  they  consent  to  avail  themselves  of  the  vast  field 
which  we  have  pointed  out,  we  shall  endeavour  to  labour  in 
it  ourselves  at  some  future  and  indefinite  period. 

I  am,  Sir,  &c., 

CELLARIUS. 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  47 

NOTE. — We  were  asked  by  a  learned  brother  philosopher 
who  saw  this  article  in  MS.  what  we  meant  by  alluding  to 
rudimentary  organs  in  machines.  Could  we,  he  asked,  give 
any  example  of  such  organs?  We  pointed  to  the  little  pro- 
tuberance at  the  bottom  of  the  bowl  of  our  tobacco  pipe. 
This  organ  was  originally  designed  for  the  same  purpose  as 
the  rim  at  the  bottom  of  a  tea-cup,  which  is  but  another  form 
of  the  same  function.  Its  purpose  was  to  keep  the  heat  of 
the  pipe  from  marking  the  table  on  which  it  rested.  Originally, 
as  we  have  seen  in  very  early  tobacco  pipes,  this  protuberance 
was  of  a  very  different  shape  to  what  it  is  now.  It  was  broad 
at  the  bottom  and  flat,  so  that  while  the  pipe  was  being 
smoked,  the  bowl  might  rest  upon  the  table.  Use  and  disuse 
have  here  come  into  play  and  served  to  reduce  the  function 
to  its  present  rudimentary  condition.  That  these  rudimentary 
organs  are  rarer  in  machinery  than  in  animal  life  is  owing  to 
the  more  prompt  action  of  the  human  selection  as  compared 
with  the  slower  but  even  surer  operation  of  natural  selection. 
Man  may  make  mistakes ;  in  the  long  run  nature  never  does 
so.  We  have  only  given  an  imperfect  example,  but  the 
intelligent  reader  will  supply  himself  with  illustrations. 

Lucubratio  Ebria 
[From  the  PreSs,  29  July,  1865] 

There  is  a  period  in  the  evening,  or  more  generally  towards 
the  still  small  hours  of  the  morning,  in  which  we  so  far  un- 
bend as  to  take  a  single  glass  of  hot  whisky  and  water.  We 
will  neither  defend  the  practice  nor  excuse  it.  We  state  it  as 
a  fact  which  must  be  borne  in  mind  by  the  readers  of  this 
article;  for  we  know  not  how,  whether  it  be  the  inspiration 
of  the  drink,  or  the  relief  from  the  harassing  work  with  which 
the  day  has  been  occupied,  or  from  whatever  other  cause, 
yet  we  are  certainly  liable  about  this  time  to  such  a  pro- 
phetic influence  as  we  seldom  else  experience.  We  are  rapt 
in  a  dream  such  as  we  ourselves  know  to  be  a  dream,  and 
which,  like  other  dreams,  we  can  hardly  embody  in  a  distinct 
utterance.  We  know  that  what  we  see  is  but  a  sort  of  in- 
tellectual Siamese  twins,  of  which  one  is  substance  and  the 
other  shadow,  but  we  cannot  set  either  free  without  killing 
both.  We  are  unable  to  rudely  tear  away  the  veil  of  phantasy 


48  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

in  which  the  truth  is  shrouded,  so  we  present  the  reader 
with  a  draped  figure,  and  his  own  judgment  must  discriminate 
between  the  clothes  and  the  body.  A  truth's  prosperity  is 
like  a  jest's,  it  lies  in  the  ear  of  him  that  hears  it.  Some  may 
see  our  lucubration  as  we  saw  it ;  and  others  may  see  nothing 
but  a  drunken  dream,  or  the  nightmare  of  a  distempered 
imagination.  To  ourselves  it  is  as  the  speaking  with  unknown 
tongues  to  the  early  Corinthians;  we  cannot  fully  under- 
stand our  own  speech,  and  we  fear  lest  there  be  not  a  sufficient 
number  of  interpreters  present  to  make  our  utterance  edify. 
But  there!  (Go  on  straight  to  the  body  of  the  article.) 

The  limbs  of  the  lower  animals  have  never  been  modified 
by  any  act  of  deliberation  and  forethought  on  their  own  part. 
Recent  researches  have  thrown  absolutely  no  light  upon  the 
origin  of  life — upon  the  initial  force  which  introduced  a 
sense  of  identity,  and  a  deliberate  faculty  into  the  world; 
but  they  do  certainly  appear  to  show  very  clearly  that  each 
species  of  the  animal  and  vegetable  kingdom  has  been  mould- 
ed into  its  present  shape  by  chances  and  changes  of  many  mil- 
lions of  years,  by  chances  and  changes  over  which  the  crea- 
ture modified  had  no  control  whatever,  and  concerning  whose 
aim  it  was  alike  unconscious  and  indifferent,  by  forces  which 
seem  insensate  to  the  pain  which  they  inflict,  but  by  whose 
inexorably  beneficent  cruelty  the  brave  and  strong  keep  com- 
ing to  the  fore,  while  the  weak  and  bad  drop  behind  and 
perish.  There  was  a  moral  government  of  this  world  before 
man  came  near  it — a  moral  government  suited  to  the  capaci- 
ties of  the  governed,  and  which,  unperceived  by  them,  has  laid 
fast  the  foundations  of  courage,  endurance  and  cunning. 
It  laid  them  so  fast  that  they  became  more  and  more  heredi- 
tary. Horace  says  well,  fortes  creantur  fortibus  et  bonis — 
good  men  beget  good  children;  the  rule  held  even  in  the 
geological  period ;  good  ichthyosauri  begat  good  ichthyosauri, 
and  would  to  our  discomfort  have  gone  on  doing  so  to  the 
present  time,  had  not  better  creatures  been  begetting  better 
things  than  ichthyosauri,  or  famine,  or  fire,  or  convulsion 
put  an  end  to  them.  Good  apes  begat  good  apes,  and  at 
last  when  human  intelligence  stole  like  a  late  spring  upon 
the  mimicry  of  our  semi-simious  ancestry,  the  creature  learnt 
how  he  could,  of  his  own  forethought,  add  extracorporaneous 
limbs  to  the  members  of  his  body  and  become  not  only  a 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  49 

vertebrate  mammal,  but  a  vertebrate  machinate  mammal  into 
the  bargain. 

It  was  a  wise  monkey  that  first  learned  to  carry  a  stick 
and  a  useful  monkey  that  mimicked  him.  For  the  race  of 
man  has  learned  to  walk  uprightly  much  as  a  child  learns 
the  same  thing.  At  first  he  crawls  on  all  fours,  then  he 
clambers,  laying  hold  of  whatever  he  can;  and  lastly  he 
stands  upright  alone  and  walks,  but  for  a  long  time  with 
an  unsteady  step.  So  when  the  human  race  was  in  its  gorilla- 
hood  it  generally  carried  a  stick;  from  carrying  a  stick  for 
many  million  years  it  became  accustomed  and  modified  to  an 
upright  position.  The  stick  wherewith  it  had  learned  to 
walk  would  now  serve  it  to  beat  its  younger  brothers  and  then 
it  found  out  its  service  as  a  lever.  Man  would  thus  learn 
that  the  limbs  of  his  body  were  not  the  only  limbs  that  he 
could  command.  His  body  was  already  the  most  versatile  in 
existence,  but  he  could  render  it  more  versatile  still.  With 
the  improvement  in  his  body  his  mind  improved  also.  He 
learnt  to  perceive  the  moral  government  under  which  he  held 
the  feudal  tenure  of  his  life — perceiving  it  he  symbolised  it, 
and  to  this  day  our  poets  and  prophets  still  strive  to  symbolise 
it  more  and  more  completely. 

The  mind  grew  because  the  body  grew — more  things  were 
perceived — more  things  were  handled,  and  being  handled 
became  familiar.  But  this  came  about  chiefly  because  there 
was  a  hand  to  handle  with ;  without  the  hand  there  would  be 
no  handling;  and  no  method  of  holding  and  examining  is 
comparable  to  the  human  hand.  The  tail  of  an  opossum 
is  a  prehensile  thing,  but  it  is  too  far  from  his  eyes — the 
elephant's  trunk  is  better,  and  it  is  probably  to  their  trunks 
that  the  elephants  owe  their  sagacity.  It  is  here  that  the 
bee  in  spite  of  her  wings  has  failed.  She  has  a  high 
civilisation  but  it  is  one  whose  equilibrium  appears  to  have 
been  already  attained ;  the  appearance  is  a  false  one,  for  the 
bee  changes,  though  more  slowly  than  man  can  watch  her; 
but  the  reason  of  the  very  gradual  nature  of  the  change  is 
chiefly  because  the  physical  organisation  of  the  insect  changes, 
but  slowly  also.  She  is  poorly  off  for  hands,  and  has  never 
fairly  grasped  the  notion  of  tacking  on  other  limbs  to  the 
limbs  of  her  own  body  and  so,  being  short-lived  to  boot, 
she  remains  from  century  to  century  to  human  eyes  in  statu 


5o  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

quo.  Her  body  never  becomes  machinate,  whereas  this  new 
phase  of  organism,  which  has  been  introduced  with  man  into 
the  mundane  economy,  has  made  him  a  very  quicksand  for  the 
foundation  of  an  unchanging  civilisation ;  certain  fundamental 
principles  will  always  remain,  but  every  century  the  change  in 
man's  physical  status,  as  compared  with  the  elements  around 
him,  is  greater  and  greater ;  he  is  a  shifting  basis  on  which  no 
equilibrium  of  habit  and  civilisation  can  be  established ;  were 
it  not  for  this  constant  change  in  our  physical  powers,  which 
our  mechanical  limbs  have  brought  about,  man  would  have 
long  since  apparently  attained  his  limit  of  possibility;  he 
would  be  a  creature  of  as  much  fixity  as  the  ants  and  bees 
— he  would  still  have  advanced,  but  no  faster  than  other 
animals  advance. 

If  there  were  a  race  of  men  without  any  mechanical  ap- 
pliances we  should  see  this  clearly.  There  are  none,  nor 
have  there  been,  so  far  as  we  can  tell,  for  millions  and  millions 
of  years.  The  lowest  Australian  savage  carries  weapons  for 
the  fight  or  the  chase,  and  has  his  cooking  and  drinking 
utensils  at  home;  a  race  without  these  things  would  be 
completely  ferae  naturae  and  not  men  at  all.  We  are  unable 
to  point  to  any  example  of  a  race  absolutely  devoid  of  extra- 
corporaneous  limbs,  but  we  can  see  among  the  Chinese  that 
with  the  failure  to  invent  new  limbs,  a  civilisation  becomes 
as  much  fixed  as  that  of  the  ants;  and  among  savage  tribes 
we  observe  that  few  implements  involve  a  state  of  things 
scarcely  human  at  all.  Such  tribes  only  advance  pari  passu 
with  the  creatures  upon  which  they  feed. 

It  is  a  mistake,  then,  to  take  the  view  adopted  by  a  previous 
correspondent  of  this  paper;  to  consider  the  machines  as 
identities,  to  animalise  them,  and  to  anticipate  their  final 
triumph  over  mankind.  They  are  to  be  regarded  as  the  mode 
of  development  by  which  human  organism  is  most  especially 
advancing,  and  every  fresh  invention  is  to  be  considered  as 
an  additional  member  of  the  resources  of  the  human  body. 
Herein  lies  the  fundamental  difference  between  man  and  his 
inferiors.  As  regards  his  flesh  and  blood,  his  senses,  appetites, 
and  affections,  the  difference  is  one  of  degree  rather  than  of 
kind,  but  in  the  deliberate  invention  of  such  unity  of  limbs 
as  is  exemplified  by  the  railway  train — that  seven-leagued  foot 
which  five  hundred  may  own  at  once — he  stands  quite  alone. 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  51 

In  confirmation  of  the  views  concerning  mechanism  which 
we  have  been  advocating  above,  it  must  be  remembered 
that  men  are  not  merely  the  children  of  their  parents,  but 
they  are  begotten  of  the  institutions  of  the  state  of  the 
mechanical  sciences  under  which  they  are  born  and  bred. 
These  things  have  made  us  what  we  are.  We  are  children  of 
the  plough,  the  spade,  and  the  ship;  we  are  children  of  the 
extended  liberty  and  knowledge  which  the  printing  press 
has  diffused.  Our  ancestors  added  these  things  to  their 
previously  existing  members ;  the  new  limbs  were  preserved 
by  natural  selection,  and  incorporated  into  human  society; 
they  descended  with  modifications,  and  hence  proceeds  the 
difference  between  our  ancestors  and  ourselves.  By  the 
institutions  and  state  of  science  under  which  a  man  is  born 
it  is  determined  whether  he  shall  have  the  limbs  of  an 
Australian  savage  or  those  of  a  nineteenth  century  English- 
man. The  former  is  supplemented  with  little  save  a  rug 
and  a  javelin ;  the  latter  varies  his  physique  with  the  changes 
of  the  season,  with  age,  and  with  advancing  or  decreasing 
wealth.  If  it  is  wet  he  is  furnished  with  an  organ  which  is 
called  an  umbrella  and  which  seems  designed  for  the  purpose 
of  protecting  either  his  clothes  or  his  lungs  from  the  injurious 
effects  of  rain.  His  watch  is  of  more  importance  to  him 
than  a  good  deal  of  his  hair,  at  any  rate  than  of  his  whiskers ; 
besides  this  he  carries  a  knife,  and  generally  a  pencil  case. 
His  memory  goes  in  a  pocket  book.  He  grows  more  complex 
as  he  becomes  older  and  he  will  then  be  seen  with  a  pair  of 
spectacles,  perhaps  also  with  false  teeth  and  a  wig ;  but,  if  he 
be  a  really  well-developed  specimen  of  the  race,  he  will  be 
furnished  with  a  large  box  upon  wheels,  two  horses,  and  a 
coachman. 

Let  the  reader  ponder  over  these  last  remarks,  and  he  will 
see  that  the  principal  varieties  and  sub- varieties  of  the  human 
race  are  not  now  to  be  looked  for  among  the  negroes,  the 
Circassians,  the  Malays,  or  the  American  aborigines,  but 
among  the  rich  and  the  poor.  The  difference  in  physical 
organisation  between  these  two  species  of  man  is  far  greater 
than  that  between  the  so-called  types  of  humanity.  The 
rich  man  can  go  from  here  to  England  whenever  he  feels 
so  inclined.  The  legs  of  the  other  are  by  an  invisible  fatality 
prevented  from  carrying  him  beyond  certain  narrow  limits. 


52  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

Neither  rich  nor  poor  as  yet  see  the  philosophy  of  the  thing, 
or  admit  that  he  who  can  tack  a  portion  of  one  of  the  P.  &  O. 
boats  on  to  his  identity  is  a  much  more  highly  organised 
being  than  one  who  cannot.  Yet  the  fact  is  patent  enough, 
if  we  once  think  it  over,  from  the  mere  consideration  of  the 
respect  with  which  we  so  often  treat  those  who  are  richer 
than  ourselves.  We  observe  men  for  the  most  part  (admitting 
however  some  few  abnormal  exceptions)  to  be  deeply  im- 
pressed by  the  superior  organisation  of  those  who  have 
money.  It  is  wrong  to  attribute  this  respect  to  any  unworthy 
motive,  for  the  feeling  is  strictly  legitimate  and  springs  from 
some  of  the  very  highest  impulses  of  our  nature.  It  is  the 
same  sort  of  affectionate  reverence  which  a  dog  feels  for 
man,  and  is  not  infrequently  manifested  in  a  similar  manner. 

We  admit  that  these  last  sentences  are  open  to  question, 
and  we  should  hardly  like  to  commit  ourselves  irrecoverably 
to  the  sentiments  they  express ;  but  we  will  say  this  much 
for  certain,  namely,  that  the  rich  man  is  the  true  hundred- 
handed  Gyges  of  the  poets.  He  alone  possesses  the  full 
complement  of  limbs  who  stands  at  the  summit  of  opulence, 
and  we  may  assert  with  strictly  scientific  accuracy  that  the 
Rothschilds  are  the  most  astonishing  organisms  that  the 
world  has  ever  yet  seen.  For  to  the  nerves  or  tissues,  or 
whatever  it  be  that  answers  to  the  helm  of  a  rich  man's 
desires,  there  is  a  whole  army  of  limbs  seen  and  unseen 
attachable:  he  may  be  reckoned  by  his  horse-power — by  the 
number  of  foot-pounds  which  he  has  money  enough  to  set 
in  motion.  Who,  then,  will  deny  that  a  man  whose  will 
represents  the  motive  power  of  a  thousand  horses  is  a  being 
very  different  from  the  one  who  is  equivalent  but  to  the  power 
of  a  single  one  ? 

Henceforward,  then,  instead  of  saying  that  a  man  is  hard 
up,  let  us  say  that  his  organisation  is  at  a  low  ebb,  or,  if 
we  wish  him  well,  let  us  hope  that  he  will  grow  plenty  of 
limbs.  It  must  be  remembered  that  we  are  dealing  with 
physical  organisations  only.  We  do  not  say  that  the  thou- 
sand-horse man  is  better  than  a  one-horse  man,  we  only  say 
that  he  is  more  highly  organised,  and  should  be  recognised  as 
being  so  by  the  scientific  leaders  of  the  period.  A  man's  will, 
truth,  endurance  are  part  of  him  also,  and  may,  as  in  the 
case  of  the  late  Mr.  Cobden,  have  in  themselves  a  power 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  53 

equivalent  to  all  the  horse-power  which  they  can  influence; 
but  were  we  to  go  into  this  part  of  the  question  we  should 
never  have  done,  and  we  are  compelled  reluctantly  to  leave 
our  dream  in  its  present  fragmentary  condition. 

Letter  to  Thomas  William  Gale  Butler 
MY  DEAR  NAMESAKE  .  .  .  February  i&th,  1876. 

My  present  literary  business  is  a  little  essay  some  25  or 
30  pp.  long,  which  is  still  all  in  the  rough  and  I  don't  know 
how  it  will  shape,  but  the  gist  of  it  is  somewhat  as  follows : — 

1.  Actions  which  we  have  acquired   with  difficulty  and 
now  perform  almost  unconsciously — as  in  playing  a  difficult 
piece  of  music,  reading,  talking,  walking  and  the  multitude  of 
actions  which  escape  our  notice  inside  other  actions,  etc. — all 
this  worked  out  with  some  detail,  say,  four  or  five  pages. 

General  deduction  that  we  never  do  anything  in  this 
unconscious  or  semi-conscious  manner  unless  we  know  how 
to  do  it  exceedingly  well  and  have  had  long  practice. 

Also  that  consciousness  is  a  vanishing  quantity  and  that  as 
soon  as  we  know  a  thing  really  well  we  become  unconscious  in 
respect  of  it — consciousness  being  of  attention  and  attention 
of  uncertainty — and  hence  the  paradox  comes  clear,  that 
as  long  as  we  know  that  we  know  a  thing  (or  do  an  action 
knowingly)  we  do  not  know  it  (or  do  the  action  with  thor- 
ough knowledge  of  our  business)  and  that  we  only  know  it 
when  we  do  not  know  of  our  knowledge. 

2.  Whatever  we  do  in  this  way  is  all  one  and  the  same 
in    kind — the    difference    being    only    in    degree.      Playing 
[almost?]    unconsciously — writing,   more  unconsciously    (as 
to  each   letter) — reading,  very  unconsciously — talking,   still 
more  unconsciously  (it  is  almost  impossible  for  us  to  notice 
the  action  of  our  tongue  in  every  letter) — walking,  much  the 
same — breathing,  still  to  a  certain  extent  within  our  own 
control — heart's  beating,  perceivable  but  beyond  our  control 
— digestion,  unperceivable  and  beyond  our  control,  digestion 
being  the  oldest  of  the  .  .  .  habits. 

3.  A  baby,  therefore,  has  known  how  to  grow  itself  in 
the  womb  and  has  only  done  it  because  it  wanted  to,  on  a 
balance  of  considerations,  in  the  same  way  as  a  man  who  goes 
into  the  City  to  buy  Great  Northern  A  Shares.  ...  It  is  only 


54  The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

unconscious  of  these  operations  because  it  has  done  them 
a  very  large  number  of  times  already.  A  man  may  do  a 
thing  by  a  fluke  once,  but  to  say  that  a  foetus  can  perform 
so  difficult  an  operation  as  the  growth  of  a  pair  of  eyes  out 
of  pure  protoplasm  without  knowing  how  to  do  it,  and  with- 
out ever  having  done  it  before,  is  to  contradict  all  human 
experience.  Ipso  facto  that  it  does  it,  it  knows  how  to  do  it, 
and  ipso  facto  that  it  knows  how  to  do  it,  it  has  done  it  before. 
Its  unconsciousness  (or  speedy  loss  of  memory)  is  simply  the 
result  of  over-knowledge,  not  of  under-knowledge.  It  knows 
so  well  and  has  done  it  so  often  that  its  power  of  self-analysis 
is  gone.  If  it  knew  what  it  was  doing,  or  was  conscious  of 
its  own  act  in  oxidising  its  blood  after  birth,  I  should  suspect 
that  it  had  not  done  it  so  often  before ;  as  it  is  I  am  confident 
that  it  must  have  done  it  more  often — much  more  often — than 
any  act  which  we  perform  consciously  during  our  whole  lives. 

4.  When,  then,  did  it  do  it?     Clearly  when  last  it  was 
an  impregnate  ovum  or  some  still  lower  form  of  life  which 
resulted  in  that  impregnate  ovum. 

5.  How   is   it,    then,   that   it   has   not   gained   perceptible 
experience?    Simply  because  a  single  repetition  makes  little 
or  no  difference ;  but  go  back  20,000  repetitions  and  you  will 
find  that  it  has  gained  in  experience  and  modified  its  per- 
formance very  materially. 

6.  But  how  about  the  identity?    What  is  identity?    Iden- 
tity of  matter?     Surely  no.     There  is  no  identity  of  matter 
between  me  as  I  now  am,  and  me  as  an  impregnate  ovum. 
Continuity  of  existence?    Then  there  is  identity  between  me 
as  an  impregnate  ovum  and  my  father  and  mother  as  impreg- 
nate ova.    Drop  out  my  father's  and  mother's  lives  between 
the  dates  of  their  being  impregnate  ova  and  the  moment  when 
I  became  an  impregnate  ovum.    See  the  ova  only  and  consider 
the  second  ovum  as  the  first  two  ova's  means  not  of  repro- 
ducing themselves  but  of  continuing  themselves — repeating 
themselves — the  intermediate  lives  being  nothing  but,  as  it 
were,  a  long  potato  shoot  from  one  eye  to  the  place  where 
it  will  grow  its  next  tuber. 

7.  Given  a  single  creature  capable  of  reproducing  itself 
and  it  must  go  on  reproducing  itself  for  ever,  for  it  would 
not  reproduce  itself,  unless  it  reproduced  a  creature  that  was 
going  to  reproduce  itself,  and  so  on  ad  infinitum. 


and  of  Life  and  Habit  55 

Then  comes  Descent  with  Modification.  Similarity  tem- 
pered with  dissimilarity,  and  dissimilarity  tempered  with 
similarity — a  contradiction  in  terms,  like  almost  everything 
else  that  is  true  or  useful  or  indeed  intelligible  at  all.  In 
each  case  of  what  we  call  descent,  it  is  still  the  first  repro- 
ducing creature  identically  the  same — doing  what  it  has  done 
before — only  with  such  modifications  as  the  struggle  for 
existence  and  natural  selection  have  induced.  No  matter 
how  highly  it  has  been  developed,  it  can  never  be  other  than 
the  primordial  cell  and  must  always  begin  as  the  primordial 
cell  and  repeat  its  last  performance  most  nearly,  but  also, 
more  or  less,  all  its  previous  performances. 

A  begets  A'  which  is  A  with  the  additional  experience  of 
a  dash.  A'  begets  A"  which  is  A  with  the  additional  ex- 
periences of  A'  and  A" ;  and  so  on  to  An,  but  you  can  never 
eliminate  the  A. 

8.  Let  An  stand  for  a  man.  He  begins  as  the  primordial 
cell — being  verily  nothing  but  the  primordial  cell  which  goes 
on  splitting  itself  up  for  ever,  but  gaining  continually  in 
experience.  Put  him  in  the  same  position  as  he  was  in  before 
and  he  will  do  as  he  did  before.  First  he  will  do  his  tadpoles 
by  rote,  so  to  speak,  on  his  head,  from  long  practice ;  then  he 
does  his  fish  trick;  then  he  grows  arms  and  legs,  all  uncon- 
sciously from  the  inveteracy  of  the  habit,  till  he  comes  to 
doing  his  man,  and  this  lesson  he  has  not  yet  learnt  so  thor- 
oughly. Some  part  of  it,  as  the  breathing  and  oxidisation 
business,  he  is  well  up  to,  inasmuch  as  they  form  part  of 
previous  roles,  but  the  teeth  and  hair,  the  upright  position, 
the  power  of  speech,  though  all  tolerably  familiar,  give  him 
more  trouble — for  he  is  very  stupid — a  regular  dunce  in  fact. 
Then  comes  his  newer  and  more  complex  environment,  and 
this  puzzles  him — arrests  his  attention — whereon  conscious- 
ness springs  into  existence,  as  a  spark  from  a  horse's  hoof. 

To  be  continued — I  see  it  will  have  to  be  more  than  30  pp. 
It  is  still  foggy  in  parts,  but  I  must  clear  it  a  little.  It  will 
go  on  to  show  that  we  are  all  one  animal  and  that  death 
(which  was  at  first  voluntary,  and  has  only  come  to  be  dis- 
liked because  those  who  did  not  dislike  it  committed  suicide 
too  easily)  and  reproduction  are  only  phases  of  the  ordinary 
waste  and  repair  which  goes  on  in  our  bodies  daily. 

Always  very  truly  yours,  S.  BUTLER, 


IV 
Memory  and  Design 


Clergymen  and  Chickens 

[Extract  from  a  lecture  On  Memory  as  a  Key  to  the  Pheno- 
mena of  Heredity  delivered  by  Butler  at  the  Working  Men's  Col- 
lege,Great  Ormond  Street,  on  Saturday,  2nd  December,  1882.] 

WHY,  let  me  ask,  should  a  hen  lay  an  egg  which  egg  can 
become  a  chicken  in  about  three  weeks  and  a  full-grown  hen 
in  less  than  a  twelvemonth,  while  a  clergyman  and  his  wife 
lay  no  eggs  but  give  birth  to  a  baby  which  will  take  three- 
and-twenty  years  before  it  can  become  another  clergyman? 
Why  should  not  chickens  be  born  and  clergymen  be  laid  and 
hatched?  Or  why,  at  any  rate,  should  not  the  clergyman 
be  born  full  grown  and  in  Holy  Orders,  not  to  say  already 
beneficed?  The  present  arrangement  is  not  convenient,  it 
is  not  cheap,  it  is  not  free  from  danger,  it  is  not  only  not 
perfect  but  is  so  much  the  reverse  that  we  could  hardly  find 
words  to  express  our  sense  of  its  awkwardness  if  we  could  look 
upon  it  with  new  eyes,  or  as  the  cuckoo  perhaps  observes  it. 

The  explanation  usually  given  is  that  it  is  a  law  of  nature 
that  children  should  be  born  as  they  are,  but  this  is  like  the 
parched  pea  which  St.  Anthony  set  before  the  devil  when  he 
came  to  supper  with  him  and  of  which  the  devil  said  that  it 
was  good  as  far  as  it  went.  We  want  more;  we  want  to 
know  with  what  familiar  set  of  facts  we  are  to  connect  the 
one  in  question  which,  though  in  our  midst,  at  present  dwells 
apart  as  a  mysterious  stranger  of  whose  belongings,  reason 
for  coming  amongst  us,  antecedents,  and  so  forth,  we  believe 
ourselves  to  be  ignorant,  though  we  know  him  by  sight  and 
name  and  have  a  fair  idea  what  sort  of  man  he  is  to  deal 
with. 

56 


Memory  and  Design  57 

We  say  it  is  a  phenomenon  of  heredity  that  chickens 
should  be  laid  as  eggs  in  the  first  instance  and  clergymen 
born  as  babies,  but,  beyond  the  fact  that  we  know  heredity 
extremely  well  to  look  at  and  to  do  business  with,  we  say 
that  we  know  nothing  about  it.  I  have  for  some  years  main- 
tained this  to  be  a  mistake  and  have  urged,  in  company  with 
Professor  Hering,  of  Prague,  and  others,  that  the  connection 
between  memory  and  heredity  is  so  close  that  there  is  no 
reason  for  regarding  the  two  as  generically  different,  though 
for  convenience  sake  it  may  be  well  to  specify  them  by 
different  names.  If  I  can  persuade  you  that  this  is  so,  I 
believe  I  shall  be  able  to  make  you  understand  why  it  is 
that  chickens  are  hatched  as  eggs  and  clergymen  born  as 
babies. 

When  I  say  I  can  make  you  understand  why  this  is  so,  I 
only  mean  that  I  can  answer  the  first  "why"  that  any  one  is 
likely  to  ask  about  it,  and  perhaps  a  "why"  or  two  behind 
this.  Then  I  must  stop.  This  is  all  that  is  ever  meant  by 
those  who  say  they  can  tell  us  why  a  thing  is  so  and  so.  No 
one  professes  to  be  able  to  reach  back  to  the  last  "why" 
that  any  one  can  ask,  and  to  answer  it.  Fortunately  for 
philosophers,  people  generally  become  fatigued  after  they 
have  heard  the  answer  to  two  or  three  "whys"  and  are  glad 
enough  to  let  the  matter  drop.  If,  however,  any  one  will 
insist  on  pushing  question  behind  question  long  enough,  he 
will  compel  us  to  admit  that  we  come  to  the  end  of  our 
knowledge  which  is  based  ultimately  upon  ignorance.  To 
get  knowledge  out  of  ignorance  seems  almost  as  hopeless  a 
task  as  to  get  something  out  of  any  number  of  nothings,  but 
this  in  practice  is  what  we  have  to  do  and  the  less  fuss  we 
make  over  it  the  better. 

When,  therefore,  we  say  that  we  know  "why"  a  thing  is 
so  and  so,  we  mean  that  we  know  its  immediate  antecedents 
and  connections,  and  find  them  familiar  to  us.  I  say  that 
the  immediate  antecedent  of,  and  the  phenomenon  most 
closely  connected  with,  heredity  is  memory.  I  do  not  profess 
to  show  why  anything  can  remember  at  all,  I  only  maintain 
that  whereas,  to  borrow  an  illustration  from  mathematics, 
life  was  formerly  an  equation  of,  say,  100  unknown  quantities, 
it  is  now  one  of  99  only,  inasmuch  as  memory  and  heredity 
have  been  shown  to  be  one  and  the  same  thing. 


58  Memory  and  Design 

Memory 
i 

Memory  is  a  kind  of  way  (or  weight — whichever  it  should 
be)  that  the  mind  has  got  upon  it,  in  virtue  of  which  the 
sensation  excited  endures  a  little  longer  than  the  cause  which 
excited  it.  There  is  thus  induced  a  state  of  things  in  which 
mental  images,  and  even  physical  sensations  (if  there  can  be 
such  a  thing  as  a  physical  sensation)  exist  by  virtue  of 
association,  though  the  conditions  which  originally  called 
them  into  existence  no  longer  continue. 

This  is  as  the  echo  continuing  to  reverberate  after  the  sound 
has  ceased. 

ii 

To  be  is  to  think  and  to  be  thinkable.  To  live  is  to  con- 
tinue thinking  and  to  remember  having  done  so.  Memory 
is  to  mind  as  viscosity  is  to  protoplasm,  it  gives  a  tenacity  to 
thought — a  kind  of  pied  a  terre  from  which  it  can,  and  with- 
out which  it  could  not,  advance. 

Thought,  in  fact,  and  memory  seem  inseparable;  no 
thought,  no  memory;  and  no  memory,  no  thought.  And, 
as  conscious  thought  and  conscious  memory  are  functions 
one  of  another,  so  also  are  unconscious  thought  and  uncon- 
scious memory.  Memory  is,  as  it  were,  the  body  of  thought, 
and  it  is  through  memory  that  body  and  mind  are  linked 
together  in  rhythm  or  vibration ;  for  body  is  such  as  it  is  by 
reason  of  the  characteristics  of  the  vibrations  that  are  going 
on  in  it,  and  memory  is  only  due  to  the  fact  that  the  vibra- 
tions are  of  such  characteristics  as  to  catch  on  to  and  be 
caught  on  to  by  other  vibrations  that  flow  into  them  from 
without — no  catch,  no  memory. 

Antitheses 

Memory  and  forgetfulness  are  as  life  and  death  to  one 
another.  To  live  is  to  remember  and  to  remember  is  to  live. 
To  die  is  to  forget  and  to  forget  is  to  die.  Everything  is  so 
much  involved  in  and  is  so  much  a  process  of  its  opposite 
that,  as  it  is  almost  fair  to  call  death  a  process  of  life  and 
life  a  process  of  death,  so  it  is  to  call  memory  a  process  of 
forgetting  and  forgetting  a  process  of  remembering.  There 


Memory  and  Design  59 

is  never  either  absolute  memory  or  absolute  forgetfulness, 
absolute  life  or  absolute  death.  So  with  light  and  darkness, 
heat  and  cold,  you  never  can  get  either  all  the  light,  or  all  the 
heat,  out  of  anything.  So  with  God  and  the  devil;  so  with 
everything.  Everything  is  like  a  door  swinging  backwards 
and  forwards.  Everything  has  a  little  of  that  from  which 
it  is  most  remote  and  to  which  it  is  most  opposed  and  these 
antitheses  serve  to  explain  one  another. 

Unconscious  Memory 

A  man  at  the  Century  Club  was  falling  foul  of  me  the 
other  night  for  my  use  of  the  word  "memory."  There  was 
no  such  thing,  he  said,  as  "unconscious  memory" — memory 
was  always  conscious,  and  so  forth.  My  business  is — and  I 
think  it  can  be  easily  done — to  show  that  they  cannot  beat 
me  off  my  unconscious  memory  without  my  being  able  to 
beat  them  off  their  conscious  memory ;  that  they  cannot  deny 
the  legitimacy  of  my  maintaining  the  phenomena  of  heredity 
to  be  phenomena  of  memory  without  my  being  able  to  deny 
the  legitimacy  of  their  maintaining  the  recollection  of  what 
they  had  for  dinner  yesterday  to  be  a  phenomenon  of  memory. 
My  theory  of  the  unconscious  does  not  lead  to  universal  un- 
consciousness, but  only  to  pigeon-holing  and  putting  by.  We 
shall  always  get  new  things  to  worry  about.  If  I  thought 
that  by  learning  more  and  more  I  should  ever  arrive  at  the 
knowledge  of  absolute  truth,  I  would  leave  off  studying.  But 
I  believe  I  am  pretty  safe. 

Reproduction  and  Memory 

There  is  the  reproduction  of  an  idea  which  has  been  pro- 
duced once  already,  and  there  is  the  reproduction  of  a  living 
form  which  has  been  produced  once  already.  The  first  re- 
production is  certainly  an  effort  of  memory.  It  should  not 
therefore  surprise  us  if  the  second  reproduction  should  turn 
out  to  be  an  effort  of  memory  also.  Indeed  all  forms  of 
reproduction  that  we  can  follow  are  based  directly  or  in- 
directly upon  memory.  It  is  only  the  one  great  act  of  repro- 
duction that  we  cannot  follow  which  we  disconnect  from 
memory. 


60  Memory  and  Design 

Personal  Identity 

We  are  so  far  identical  with  our  ancestors  and  our  con- 
temporaries that  it  is  very  rarely  we  can  see  anything  that 
they  do  not  see.  It  is  not  unjust  that  the  sins  of  the  fathers 
should  be  visited  upon  the  children,  for  the  children  com- 
mitted the  sins  when  in  the  persons  of  their  fathers;  they 
ate  the  sour  grapes  before  they  were  born:  true,  they  have 
forgotten  the  pleasure  now,  but  so  has  a  man  with  a  sick 
headache  forgotten  the  pleasure  of  getting  drunk  the  night 
before. 

Sensations 

Our  sensations  are  only  distinguishable  because  we  feel 
them  in  different  places  and  at  different  times.  If  we  feel 
them  at  very  nearly  the  same  time  and  place  we  cannot 
distinguish  them. 

Cobwebs  in  the  Dark 

If  you  walk  at  night  and  your  face  comes  up  against  a 
spider's  web  woven  across  the  road,  what  a  shock  that  thin 
line  gives  you!  You  fristle  through  every  nerve  of  your 
body. 

Shocks  and  Memory 

Memory  is  our  sense  that  we  are  being  shocked  now  as  we 
were  shocked  then. 

Shocks 

Given  matter  conscious  in  one  part  of  itself  of  a  shock  in 
another  part  (i.e.  knowing  in  what  part  of  itself  it  is 
shocked)  retaining  a  memory  of  each  shock  for  a  little  while 
afterwards,  able  to  feel  whether  two  shocks  are  simultaneous 
or  in  succession,  and  able  to  know  whether  it  has  been  shocked 
much  or  little — given  also  that  association  does  not  stick  to 
the  letter  of  its  bond — and  the  rest  will  follow. 

Design 
i 

There  is  often  connection  but  no  design,  as  when  I  stamp 
my  foot  with  design  and  shake  something  down  without 


Memory  and  Design  61 

design,  or  as  when  a  man  runs  up  against  another  in  the 
street  and  knocks  him  down  without  intending  it.  This  is 
undesign  within  design. 

Fancied  insults  are  felt  by  people  who  see  design  in  a  con- 
nection where  they  should  see  little  connection,  and  no  design. 

Connection  with  design  is  sometimes  hard  to  distinguish 
from  connection  without  design;  as  when  a  man  treads  on 
another's  corns,  it  is  not  always  easy  to  say  whether  he  has 
done  so  accidentally  or  on  purpose. 

Men  have  been  fond  in  all  ages  of  ascribing  connection 
where  there  is  none.  Thus  astrology  has  been  believed  in. 
Before  last  Christmas  I  said  I  had  neglected  the  feasts  of 
the  Church  too  much,  and  that  I  should  probably  be  more 
prosperous  if  I  paid  more  attention  to  them:  so  I  hung  up 
three  pieces  of  ivy  in  my  rooms  on  Xmas  Eve.  A  few  months 
afterwards  I  got  the  entail  cut  off  my  reversion,  but  I  should 
hardly  think  there  was  much  connection  between  the  two 
things.  Nevertheless  I  shall  hang  some  holly  up  this  year. 

ii 

It  seems  also  designed,  ab  extra  (though  who  can  say 
whether  this  is  so?),  that  no  one  should  know  anything 
whatever  about  the  ultimate,  or  even  deeper  springs  of  growth 
and  action.  If  not  designed  the  result  is  arrived  at  as  effectu- 
ally as  though  it  were  so. 

Accident,  Design  and  Memory 

It  is  right  to  say  either  that  heredity  and  memory  are  one 
and  the  same  thing,  or  that  heredity  is  a  mode  of  memory, 
or  that  heredity  is  due  to  memory,  if  it  is  thereby  intended 
that  animals  can  only  grow  in  virtue  of  being  able  to  recol- 
lect. Memory  and  heredity  are*the  means  of  preserving  ex- 
periences, of  building  them  together,  of  uniting  a  mass  of 
often  confused  detail  into  homogeneous  and  consistent  mind 
and  matter,  but  they  do  not  originate.  The  increment  in  each 
generation,  at  the  moment  of  its  being  an  increment,  has  noth- 
ing to  do  with  memory  or  heredity,  it  is  due  to  the  chances 
and  changes  of  this  mortal  state.  Design  conies  in  at  the 
moment  that  a  living  being  either  feels  a  want  and  forecasts 
for  its  gratification,  or  utilises  some  waif  or  stray  of  accident 


62  Memory  and  Design 

on  the  principle,  which  underlies  all  development,  that  enough 
is  a  little  more  than  what  one  has.  It  is  the  business  of  mem- 
ory and  heredity  to  conserve  and  to  transmit  from  one  gener- 
ation to  another  that  which  has  been  furnished  by  design,  or 
by  accident  designedly  turned  to  account. 

It  is  therefore  not  right  to  say,  as  some  have  supposed  me 
to  mean,  that  we  can  do  nothing  which  we  do  not  remember 
to  have  done  before.  We  can  do  nothing  very  difficult  or 
complicated  which  we  have  not  done  before,  unless  as  by  a 
tour  de  force,  once  in  a  way,  under  exceptionally  favourable 
circumstances,  but  our  whole  conscious  life  is  the  perform- 
ance of  acts  either  imperfectly  remembered  or  not  remem- 
bered at  all.  There  are  rain-drops  of  new  experiences  in 
every  life  which  are  not  within  the  hold  of  our  memory  or 
past  experience,  and,  as  each  one  of  these  rain-drops  came 
originally  from  something  outside,  the  whole  river  of  our 
life  has  in  its  inception  nothing  to  do  with  memory,  though  it 
is  only  through  memory  that  the  rain-drops  of  new  experience 
can  ever  unite  to  form  a  full  flowing  river  of  variously  organ- 
ised life  and  intelligence. 

Memory  and  Mistakes 

Memory  vanishes  with  extremes  of  resemblance  or  differ- 
ence. Things  which  put  us  in  mind  of  others  must  be  neither 
too  like  nor  too  unlike  them.  It  is  our  sense  that  a  position 
is  not  quite  the  same  which  makes  us  find  it  so  nearly  the 
same.  We  remember  by  the  aid  of  differences  as  much  as  by 
that  of  samenesses.  If  there  could  be  no  difference  there 
would  be  no  memory,  for  the  two  positions  would  become 
absolutely  one  and  the  same,  and  the  universe  would  repeat 
itself  for  ever  and  ever  as  between  these  two  points. 

When  ninety-nine  hundredths  of  one  set  of  phenomena 
are  presented  while  the  hundredth  is  withdrawn  without  ap- 
parent cause,  so  that  we  can  no  longer  do  something  which 
according  to  our  past  experience  we  ought  to  find  no  difficulty 
in  doing,  then  we  may  guess  what  a  bee  must  feel  as  it  goes 
flying  up  and  down  a  window-pane.  Then  we  have  doubts 
thrown  upon  the  fundamental  axiom  of  life,  i.e.  that  like 
antecedents  will  be  followed  by  like  consequents.  On  this 
we  go  mad  and  die  in  a  short  time. 


Memory  and  Design  63 

Mistaken  memory  may  be  as  potent  as  genuine  recollec- 
tion so  far  as  its  effects  go,  unless  it  happens  to  come  more 
into  collision  with  other  and  not  mistaken  memories  than  it 
is  able  to  contend  against. 

Mistakes  or  delusions  occur  mainly  in  two  ways. 

First,  when  the  circumstances  have  changed  a  little  but 
not  enough  to  make  us  recognise  the  fact:  this  may  happen 
either  because  of  want  of  attention  on  our  part  or  because 
of  the  hidden  nature  of  the  alteration,  or  because  of  its 
slightness  in  itself,  the  importance  depending  upon  its  rela- 
tions to  something  else  which  make  a  very  small  change  have 
an  importance  it  would  not  otherwise  have :  in  these  cases  the 
memory  reverts  to  the  old  circumstances  unmodified,  a  suffi- 
cient number  of  the  associated  ideas  having  been  repro- 
duced to  make  us  assume  the  remainder  without  further 
inspection,  and  hence  follows  a  want  of  harmony  between 
action  and  circumstances  which  results  in  trouble  somewhere. 

Secondly,  through  the  memory  not  reverting  in  full  per- 
fection, though  the  circumstances  are  reproduced  fully  and 
accurately. 

Remembering 

When  asked  to  remember  "something"  indefinitely  you 
cannot :  you  look  round  at  once  for  something  to  suggest 
what  you  shall  try  and  remember.  For  thought  must  be 
always  about  some  "thing"  which  thing  must  either  be  a 
thing  by  courtesy,  as  an  air  of  Handel's,  or  else  a  solid, 
tangible  object,  as  a  piano  or  an  organ,  but  always  the  thing 
must  be  linked  on  to  matter  by  a  longer  or  shorter  chain  as 
the  case  may  be.  I  was  thinking  of  this  once  while  walking 
by  the  side  of  the  Serpentine  and,  looking  round,  saw  some 
ducks  alighting  on  the  water;  their  feet  reminded  me  of  the 
way  the  sea-birds  used  to  alight  when  I  was  going  to  New 
Zealand  and  I  set  to  work  recalling  attendant  facts.  Without 
help  from  outside  I  should  have  remembered  nothing. 

A  Torn  Finger-Nail 

Henry  Hoare  [a  college  friend],  when  a  young  man  of 
about  five-and-twenty,  one  day  tore  the  quick  of  his  finger- 
nail— I  mean  he  separated  the  fleshy  part  of  the  finger  from 


64  Memory  and  Design 

the  nail — and  this  reminded  him  that  many  years  previously, 
while  quite  a  child,  he  had  done  the  same  thing.  Thereon  he 
fell  to  thinking  of  that  time  which  was  impressed  upon  his 
memory  partly  because  there  was  a  great  disturbance  in  the 
house  about  a  missing  five-pound  note  and  partly  because  it 
was  while  he  had  the  scarlet  fever. 

Following  the  train  of  thought  aroused  by  his  torn  finger, 
he  asked  himself  how  he  had  torn  it,  and  after  a  while  it  came 
back  to  him  that  he  had  been  lying  ill  in  bed  as  a  child  of 
seven  at  the  house  of  an  aunt  who  lived  in  Hertfordshire. 
His  arms  often  hung  out  of  the  bed  and,  as  his  hands  wan- 
dered over  the  wooden  frame,  he  felt  that  there  was  a  place 
where  a  nut  had  come  out  so  that  he  could  put  his  fingers  in. 
One  day,  in  trying  to  stuff  a  piece  of  paper  into  this  hole,  he 
stuffed  it  in  so  far  and  so  tightly  that  he  tore  the  quick  of  his 
nail.  The  whole  thing  came  back  vividly  and,  though  he  had 
not  thought  of  it  for  nearly  twenty  years,  he  could  see  the 
room  in  his  aunt's  house  and  remembered  how  his  aunt  used 
to  sit  by  his  bedside  writing  at  a  little  table  from  which  he 
had  got  the  piece  of  paper  which  he  had  stuffed  into  the  hole. 

So  far  so  good.  But  then  there  flashed  upon  him  an  idea 
that  was  not  so  pleasant.  I  mean  it  came  upon  him  with 
irresistible  force  that  the  piece  of  paper  he  had  stuffed  into 
the  hole  in  the  bedstead  was  the  missing  five-pound  note 
about  which  there  had  been  so  much  disturbance.  At  that 
time  he  was  so  young  that  a  five-pound  note  was  to  him  only 
a  piece  of  paper ;  when  he  heard  that  the  money  was  missing, 
he  had  thought  it  was  five  sovereigns;  or  perhaps  he  was 
too  ill  to  think  anything,  or  to  be  questioned ;  I  forget  what  I 
was  told  about  this— at  any  rate  he  had  no  idea  of  the  value 
of  the  piece  of  paper  he  was  stuffing  into  the  hole.  But  now 
the  matter  had  recurred  to  him  at  all  he  felt  so  sure  that  it 
was  the  note  that  he  immediately  went  down  to  Hertford- 
shire, where  his  aunt  was  still  living,  and  asked,  to  the  sur- 
prise of  every  one,  to  be  allowed  to  wash  his  hands  in  the 
room  he  had  occupied  as  a  child.  He  was  told  that  there 
were  friends  staying  in  the  house  who  had  the  room  at  pres- 
ent, but,  on  his  saying  he  had  a  reason  and  particularly  beg- 
ging to  be  allowed  to  remain  alone  a  little  while  in  this  room, 
he  was  taken  upstairs  and  left  there. 

He  went  to  the  bed,  lifted  up  the  chintz  which  then  covered 


Memory  and  Design  65 

the  frame,  and  found  his  old  friend  the  hole.  A  nut  had  been 
supplied  and  he  could  no  longer  get  his  finger  into  it.  He 
rang  the  bell  and  when  the  servant  came  asked  for  a  bed-key. 
All  this  time  he  was  rapidly  acquiring  the  reputation  of 
being  a  lunatic  throughout  the  whole  house,  but  the  key  was 
brought,  and  by  the  help  of  it  he  got  the  nut  off.  When  he 
had  done  so,  there,  sure  enough,  by  dint  of  picking  with  his 
pocket-knife,  he  found  the  missing  five-pound  note. 

See  how  the  return  of  a  given  present  brings  back  the 
presents  that  have  been  associated  with  it. 

Unconscious  Association 

One  morning  I  was  whistling  to  myself  the  air  "In  Sweet- 
est Hjarmony"  from  Saul.  Jones  heard  me  and  said : 

"Do  you  know  why  you  are  whistling  that?" 

I  said  I  did  not. 

Then  he  said :  "Did  you  not  hear  me,  two  minutes  ago, 
whistling  'Eagles  were  not  so  Swift'?" 

I  had  not  noticed  his  doing  so,  and  it  was  so  long  since 
I  had  played  that  chorus  myself  that  I  doubt  whether  I 
should  have  consciously  recognised  it.  That  I  did  recognise  it 
unconsciously  is  tolerably  clear  from  my  having  gone  on 
with  "In  Sweetest  Harmony,"  which  is  the  air  that  follows  it. 

Association 

If  you  say  "Hallelujah"  to  a  cat,  it  will  excite  no  fixed 
set  of  fibres  in  connection  with  any  other  set  and  the  cat 
will  exhibit  none  of  the  phenomena  of  consciousness.  But 
if  you  say  "Me-e-at,"  the  cat  will  be  there  in  a  moment, 
for  the  due  connection  between  the  sets  of  fibres  has  been 
established. 

Language 

The  reason  why  words  recall  ideas  is  that  the  word  has 
been  artificially  introduced  among  the  associated  ideas,  and 
the  presence  of  one  idea  recalls  the  others. 


V 
Vibrations 

Contributions  to  Evolution 

To  me  it  seems  that  my  contributions  to  the  theory  of  evolu- 
tion have  been  mainly  these : 

1.  The   identification   of   heredity   and    memory   and   the 
corollaries  relating  to  sports,  the  reversion  to  remote  ancestors, 
the  phenomena  of  old  age,  the  causes  of  the  sterility  of  hybrids 
and  the  principles  underlying  longevity — all  of  which  follow 
as  a  matter  of  course.    This  was  Life  and  Habit.    [1877.] 

2.  The  re-introduction  of  teleology  into  organic  life  which, 
to  me,  seems  hardly  (if  at  all)  less  important  than  the  Life 
and  Habit  theory.  This  was  Evolution  Old  and  New.   [1879.] 

3.  An  attempt  to  suggest  an  explanation  of  the  physics 
of  memory.    I  was  alarmed  by  the  suggestion  and  fathered 
it  upon  Professor  Hering  who  never,  that  I  can  see,  meant 
to  say  anything  of  the  kind,  but  I  forced  my  view  on  him, 
as  it  were,  by  taking  hold  of  a  sentence  or  two  in  his  lecture, 
on  Memory  as  a  Universal  Function  of  Organised  Matter,  and 
thus    connected   memory   with   vibrations.      This    was    Un- 
conscious Memory.    [1880.] 

What  I  want  to  do  now  [1885]  is  to  connect  vibrations 
not  only  with  memory  but  with  the  physical  constitution  of 
that  body  in  which  the  memory  resides,  thus  adopting  New- 
land's  law  (sometimes  called  Mendele Jeff's  law)  that  there  is 
only  one  substance,  and  that  the  characteristics  of  the  vibra- 
tions going  on  within  it  at  any  given  time  will  determine 
whether  it  will  appear  to  us  as  (say)  hydrogen,  or  sodium,  or 
chicken  doing  this,  or  chicken  doing  the  other.  [This  is 
touched  upon  in  the  concluding  chapter  of  Luck  or  Cunning? 
1887.] 

66 


Vibrations  67 

I  would  make  not  only  the  mind,  but  the  body  of  the 
organism  to  depend  on  the  characteristics  of  the  vibrations 
going  on  within  it.  The  same  vibrations  which  remind  the 
chicken  that  it  wants  iron  for  its  blood  actually  turn  the 
pre-existing  matter  in  the  egg  into  the  required  material. 
According  to  this  view  the  form  and  characteristics  of  the 
elements  are  as  much  the  living  expositions  of  certain  vibra- 
tions— are  as  much  our  manner  of  perceiving  that  the  vibra- 
tions going  on  in  that  part  of  the  one  universal  substance  are 
such  and  such — as  the  colour  yellow  is  our  perception  that  a 
substance  is  being  struck  by  vibrations  of  light,  so  many  to 
the  second,  or  as  the  action  of  a  man  walking  about  is  our 
mode  of  perceiving  that  such  and  such  another  combination 
of  vibrations  is,  for  the  present,  going  on  in  the  substance 
which,  in  consequence,  has  assumed  the  shape  of  the  par- 
ticular man. 

It  is  somewhere  in  this  neighbourhood  that  I  look  for  the 
connection  between  organic  and  inorganic. 

The  Universal  Substance 


We  shall  never  get  straight  till  we  leave  off  trying  to 
separate  mind  and  matter.  Mind  is  not  a  thing  or,  if  it  be, 
we  know  nothing  about  it;  it  is  a  function  of  matter.  Matter 
is  not  a  thing  or,  if  it  be,  we  know  nothing  about  it;  it  is 
a  function  of  mind. 

We  should  see  an  omnipotent,  universal  substance,  some- 
times in  a  dynamical  and  sometimes  in  a  statical  condition 
and,  in  either  condition,  always  retaining  a  little  of  its  oppo- 
site ;  and  we  should  see  this  substance  as  at  once  both  material 
and  mental,  whether  it  be  in  the  one  condition  or  in  the  other. 
The  statical  condition  represents  content,  the  dynamical,  dis- 
content; and  both  content  and  discontent,  each  still  retain- 
ing a  little  of  its  opposite,  must  be  carried  down  to  the 
lowest  atom. 

Action  is  the  process  whereby  thought,  which  is  mental, 
is  materialised  and  whereby  substance,  which  is  material, 
is  mentalised.  It  is  like  the  present,  which  unites  times 
past  and  future  and  which  is  the  only  time  worth  thinking  of 
and  yet  is  the  only  time  which  has  no  existence. 


68  Vibrations 

I  do  not  say  that  thought  actually  passes  into  substance, 
or  mind  into  matter,  by  way  of  action — I  do  not  know  what 
thought  is — but  every  thought  involves  bodily  change,  i.e. 
action,  and  every  action  involves  thought,  conscious  or  un- 
conscious.' The  action  is  the  point  of  juncture  between  bodily 
change,  visible  and  otherwise  sensible,  and  mental  change 
which  is  invisible  except  as  revealed  through  action.  So  that 
action  is  the  material  symbol  of  certain  states  of  mind.  It 
translates  the  thought  into  a  corresponding  bodily  change. 

ii 

When  the  universal  substance  is  at  rest,  that  is,  not  vibrat- 
ing at  all,  it  is  absolutely  imperceptible  whether  by  itself 
or  anything  else%  It  is  to  all  intents  and  purposes  fast 
asleep  or,  rather,  so  completely  non-existent  that  you  can 
walk  through  it,  or  it  through  you,  and  it  knows  neither 
time  nor  space  but  presents  all  the  appearance  of  perfect 
vacuum.  It  is  in  an  absolutely  statical  state.  But  when  it 
is  not  at  rest,  it  becomes  perceptible  both  to  itself  and  others ; 
that  is  to  say,  it  assumes  material  guise  such  as  makes  it 
perceptible  both  to  itself  and  others.  It  is  then  tending 
towards  rest,  i.e.  in  a  dynamical  state.  The  not  being  at 
rest  is  the  being  in  a  vibratory  condition.  It  is  the  disturbance 
of  the  repose  of  the  universal,  invisible  and  altogether  im- 
perceptible substance  by  way  of  vibration  which  constitutes 
matter  at  all ;  it  is  the  character  of  the  vibrations  which  con- 
stitutes the  particular  kind  of  matter.  (May  we  imagine 
that  some  vibrations  vibrate  with  a  rhythm  which  has  a 
tendency  to  recur  like  the  figures  in  a  recurring  decimal,  and 
that  here  we  have  the  origin  of  the  reproductive  system?) 

We  should  realise  that  all  space  is  at  all  times  full  of  a 
stuff  endowed  with  a  mind  and  that  both  stuff  and  mind  are 
immaterial  and  imperceptible  so  long  as  they  are  undisturbed, 
but  the  moment  they  are  disturbed  the  stuff  becomes  material 
and  the  mind  perceptible.  It  is  not  easy  to  disturb  them, 
for  the  atmosphere  protects  them.  So  long  as  they  are  un- 
disturbed they  transmit  light,  etc.,  just  as  though  they  were 
a  rigid  substance,  for,  not  being  disturbed,  they  detract 
nothing  from  any  vibration  which  enters  them. 

What  will  cause  a  row  will  be  the  hitting  upon  some  plan 
for  waking  up  the  ether.  It  is  here  that  we  must  look  for 


Vibrations  69 

the  extension  of  the  world  when  it  has  become  over-peopled 
or  when,  through  its  gradual  cooling  down,  it  becomes  less 
suitable  for  a  habitation.  By  and  by  we  shall  make  new 
worlds. 

Mental  and  Physical 

A  strong  hope  of  £20,000  in  the  heart  of  a  poor  but  capable 
man  may  effect  a  considerable  redistribution  of  the  forces 
of  nature — may  even  remove  mountains.  The  little,  unseen 
impalpable  hope  sets  up  a  vibrating  movement  in  a  messy 
substance  shut  in  a  dark  warm  place  inside  the  man's  skull. 
The  vibrating  substance  undergoes  a  change  that  none  can 
note,  whereupon  rings  of  rhythm  circle  outwards  from  it 
as  from  a  stone  thrown  into  a  pond,  so  that  the  Alps  are 
pierced  in  consequence. 

Vibrations,    Memory    and    Chemical    Properties 

The  quality  of  every  substance  depends  upon  its  vibrations, 
but  so  does  the  quality  of  all  thought  and  action.  Quality 
is  only  one  mode  of  action;  the  action  of  developing,  the 
desire  to  make  this  or  that,  and  do  this  or  that,  and  the 
stuff  we  make  are  alike  due  to  the  nature  and  characteristics 
of  vibrations. 

I  want  to  connect  the  actual  manufacture  of  the  things  a 
chicken  makes  inside  an  egg  with  the  desire  and  memory  of 
the  chickens,  so  as  to  show  that  one  and  the  same  set  of 
vibrations  at  once  change  the  universal  substratum  into  the 
particular  phase  of  it  required  and  awaken  a  consciousness  of, 
and  a  memory  of  and  a  desire  towards,  this  particular  phase 
on  the  part  of  the  molecules  which  are  being  vibrated  into  it. 
So,  for  example,  that  a  set  of  vibrations  shall  at  once  turn 
plain  white  and  yolk  of  egg  into  the  feathers,  blood  and  bones 
of  a  chicken  and,  at  the  same  time,  make  the  mind  of  the 
embryo  to  be  such  or  such  as  it  is. 

Protoplasm  and  Reproduction 

The  reason  why  the  offspring  of  protoplasm  progressed, 
and  the  offspring  of  nothing  else  does  so,  is  that  the  viscid 
nature  of  protoplasm  allows  vibrations  to  last  a  very  long 


70  Vibrations 

time,  and  so  very  old  vibrations  get  carried  into  any  fragment 
that  is  broken  off;  whereas  in  the  case  of  air  and  water, 
vibrations  get  soon  effaced  and  only  very  recent  vibrations 
get  carried  into  the  young  air  and  the  young  water  which 
are,  therefore,  born  fully  grown ;  they  cannot  grow  any  more 
nor  can  they  decay  till  they  are  killed  outright  by  something 
decomposing  them.  If  protoplasm  was  more  viscid  it  would 
not  vibrate  easily  enough ;  if  less,  it  would  run  away  into  the 
surrounding  water. 

Germs  within  Germs 

When  we  say  that  the  germ  within  the  hen's  egg  remem- 
bers having  made  itself  into  a  chicken  on  past  occasions,  or 
that  each  one  of  100,000  salmon  germs  remembers  to  have 
made  itself  into  a  salmon  (male  or  female)  in  the  persons  of 
the  single  pair  of  salmon  its  parents,  do  we  intend  that  each 
single  one  of  these  germs  was  a  witness  of,  and  a  concurring 
agent  in,  the  development  of  the  parent  forms  from  their 
respective  germs,  and  that  each"  one  of  them  therefore,  was 
shut  up  within  the  parent  germ,  like  a  small  box  inside  a  big 
one? 

If  so,  then  the  parent  germ  with  its  millions  of  brothers 
and  sisters  was  in  like  manner  enclosed  within  a  grand- 
parental  germ,  and  so  on  till  we  are  driven  to  admit,  after 
even  a  very  few  generations,  that  each  ancestor  has  contained 
more  germs  than  could  be  expressed  by  a  number  written 
in  small  numerals,  beginning  at  St.  Paul's  and  ending  at 
Charing  Cross.  Mr.  Darwin's  provisional  theory  of  pangen- 
esis  comes  to  something  very  like  this,  so  far  as  it  can  be 
understood  at  all. 

Therefore  it  will  save  trouble  (and  we  should  observe  no 
other  consideration)  to  say  that  the  germs  that  unite  to  form 
any  given  sexually  produced  individual  were  not  present  in 
the  germs,  or  with  the  germs,  from  which  the  parents  sprang, 
but  that  they  came  into  the  parents'  bodies  at  some  later 
period. 

We  may  perhaps  find  it  convenient  to  account  for  their 
intimate  acquaintance  with  the  past  history  of  the  body  into 
which  they  have  been  introduced  by  supposing  that  in  virtue 
of  assimilation  they  have  acquired  certain  periodical  rhythms 


Vibrations  71 

already  pre-existing  in  the  parental  bodies,  and  that  the 
communication  of  the  characteristics  of  these  rhythms  de- 
termines at  once  the  physical  and  psychical  development  of 
the  individual  in  a  course  as  nearly  like  that  of  the  parents 
as  changed  surroundings  will  allow. 

For,  according  to  my  Life  and  Habit  theory,  everything 
in  connection  with  embryonic  development  is  referred  to 
memory,  and  this  involves  that  the  thing  remembering  should 
have  been  present  and  an  actor  in  the  development  which  it 
is  supposed  to  remember;  but  we  have  just  settled  that  the 
germs  which  unite  to  form  any  individual,  and  which  when 
united  proceed  to  develop  according  to  what  I  suppose  to 
be  their  memory  of  their  previous  developments,  were  not 
participators  in  any  previous  development  and  cannot  there- 
fore remember  it.  They  cannot  remember  even  a  single 
development,  much  less  can  they  remember  that  infinite 
series  of  developments  the  recollection  and  epitomisation  of 
which  is  a  sine  qua  non  for  the  unconsciousness  which  we 
note  in  normal  development.  I  see  no  way  of  getting  out  of 
this  difficulty  so  convenient  as  to  say  that  a  memory  is  the 
reproduction  and  recurrence  of  a  rhythm  communicated  di- 
rectly or  indirectly  from  one  substance  to  another,  and  that 
where  a  certain  rhythm  exists  there  is  a  certain  stock  of 
memories,  whether  the  actual  matter  in  which  the  rhythm 
now  subsists  was  present  with  the  matter  in  which  it  arose 
or  not. 

There  is  another  little  difficulty  in  the  question  whether 
the  matter  that  I  suppose  introduced  into  the  parents' 
bodies  during  their  life-histories,  and  that  goes  to  form  the 
germs  that  afterwards  become  their  offspring,  is  living  or 
non-living.  If  living,  then  it  has  its  own  memories  and  life- 
histories  which  must  be  cancelled  and  undone  before  the 
assimilation  and  the  becoming  imbued  with  new  rhythms  can 
be  complete.  That  is  to  say  it  must  become  as  near  non- 
living as  anything  can  become. 

Sooner  or  later,  then,  we  get  this  introduced  matter  to  be 
non-living  (as  we  may  call  it)  and  the  puzzle  is  how  to  get 
it  living  again.  For  we  strenuously  deny  equivocal  generation. 
When  matter  is  living  we  contend  that  it  can  only  have  been 
begotten  of  other  like  living  matter;  we  deny  that  it  can 
have  become  living  from  non-living.  Here,  however,  within 


72  Vibrations 

the  bodies  of  animals  and  vegetables  we  find  equivocal  gen- 
eration a  necessity ;  nor  do  I  see  any  way  out  of  it  except  by 
maintaining  that  nothing  is  ever  either  quite  dead  or  quite 
alive,  but  that  a  little  leaven  of  the  one  is  always  left  in  the 
other.  For  it  would  be  as  difficult  to  get  the  thing  dead,  if  it 
is  once  all  alive,  as  alive  if  once  all  dead. 

According  to  this  view  to  beget  offspring  is  to  communicate 
to  two  pieces  of  protoplasm  (which  afterwards  combine) 
certain  rhythmic  vibrations  which,  though  too  feeble  to  gen- 
erate visible  action  until  they  receive  accession  of  fresh 
similar  rhythms  from  exterior  objects,  yet  on  receipt  of 
such  accession  set  the  game  of  development  going  and  main- 
tain it.  It  will  be  observed  that  the  rhythms  supposed  to  be 
communicated  to  any  germs  are  such  as  have  been  already 
repeatedly  refreshed  by  rhythms  from  exterior  objects  in 
preceding  generations,  so  that  a  consonance  is  rehearsed  and 
pre-arranged,  as  it  were,  between  the  rhythm  in  the  germ  and 
those  that  in  the  normal  course  of  its  ulterior  existence  are 
likely  to  flow  into  it.  If  there  is  too  serious  a  discord  between 
inner  and  outer  rhythms  the  organism  dies. 

Atoms  and  Fixed  Laws 

When  people  talk  of  atoms  obeying  fixed  laws,  they  are 
either  ascribing  some  kind  of  intelligence  and  free  will  to 
atoms  or  they  are  talking  nonsense.  There  is  no  obedience 
unless  there  is  at  any  rate  a  potentiality  of  disobeying. 

No  objection  can  lie  to  our  supposing  potential  or  elemen- 
tary volition  and  consciousness  to  exist  in  atoms,  on  the  score 
that  their  action  would  be  less  regular  or  uniform  if  they  had 
free  will  than  if  they  had  not.  By  giving  them  free  will  we 
do  no  more  than  those  who  make  them  bound  to  obey  fixed 
laws.  They  will  be  as  certain  to  use  their  freedom  of  will 
only  in  particular  ways  as  to  be  driven  into  those  ways  by 
obedience  to  fixed  laws. 

The  little  element  of  individual  caprice  (supposing  we  start 
with  free  will),  or  (supposing  we  start  with  necessity)  the 
little  element  of  stiffneckedness,  both  of  which  elements  we 
find  everywhere  in  nature,  these  are  the  things  that  prevent 
even  the  most  reliable  things  from  being  absolutely  reliable. 
It  is  they  that  form  the  point  of  contact  between  this  universe 


Vibrations  73 

and  something  else  quite  different  in  which  none  of  those 
fundamental  ideas  obtain  without  which  we  cannot  think  at 
all.  So  we  say  that  nitrous  acid  is  more  reliable  than  nitric 
for  etching. 

Atoms  have  a  mind  as  much  smaller  and  less  complex 
than  ours  as  their  bodies  are  smaller  and  less  complex. 

Complex  mind  involves  complex  matter  and  vice  versa. 
On  the  whole  I  think  it  would  be  most  convenient  to  endow 
all  atoms  with  a  something  of  consciousness  and  volition, 
and  to  hold  them  to  be  pro  tanto,  living.  We  must  suppose 
them  able  to  remember  and  forget,  i.e.  to  retain  certain  vibra- 
tions that  have  been  once  established — gradually  to  lose  them 
and  to  receive  others  instead.  We  must  suppose  some  more 
intelligent,  versatile  and  of  greater  associative  power  than 
others. 

Thinking 

All  thinking  is  of  disturbance,  dynamical,  a  state  of  unrest 
tending  towards  equilibrium.  It  is  all  a  mode  of  classifying 
and  of  criticising  with  a  view  of  knowing  whether  it  gives  us, 
or  is  likely  to  give  us,  pleasure  or  no. 

Equilibrium 

In  the  highest  consciousness  there  is  still  unconsciousness, 
in  the  lowest  unconsciousness  there  is  still  consciousness.  If 
there  is  no  consciousness  there  is  no  thing,  or  nothing.  To 
understand  perfectly  would  be  to  cease  to  understand  at  all. 

It  is  in  the  essence  of  heaven  that  we  are  not  to  be  thwarted 
or  irritated,  this  involves  absolute  equilibrium  and  absolute 
equilibrium  involves  absolute  unconsciousness.  Christ  is 
equilibrium — the  not  wanting  anything,  either  more  or  less. 
Death  also  is  equilibrium.  But  Christ  is  a  more  living  kind 
of  death  than  death  is. 


VI 
Mind  and  Matter 

Motion 

WE  cannot  define  either  motion  or  matter,  but  we  have 
certain  rough  and  ready  ideas  concerning  them  which,  right 
or  wrong,  we  must  make  the  best  of  without  more  words, 
for  the  chances  are  ten  to  one  that  attempted  definition  will 
fuzz  more  than  it  will  clear. 

Roughly,  matter  and  motion  are  functions  one  of  another, 
as  are  mind  and  matter;  they  are  essentially  concomitant 
with  one  another,  and  neither  can  vary  but  the  other  varies 
also.  You  cannot  have  a  thing  "matter"  by  itself  which 
shall  have  no  motion  in  it,  nor  yet  a  thing  "motion"  by 
itself  which  shall  exist  apart  from  matter;  you  must  have 
both  or  neither.  You  can  have  matter  moving  much,  or 
little,  and  in  all  conceivable  ways;  but  you  cannot  have 
matter  without  any  motion  more  than  you  can  have  motion 
without  any  matter  that  is  moving. 

Its  states,  its  behaviour  under  varying  circumstances,  that 
is  to  say  the  characteristics  of  its  motions,  are  all  that  we 
can  cognise  in  respect  of  matter.  We  recognise  certain 
varying  states  or  conditions  of  matter  and  give  one  state 
one  name,  and  another  another,  as  though  it  were  a  man  or 
a  dog;  but  it  is  the  state  not  the  matter  that  we  cognise, 
just  as  it  is  the  man's  moods  and  outward  semblance  that 
we  alone  note,  while  knowing  nothing  of  the  man.  Of  matter 
in  its  ultimate  essence  and  apart  from  motion  we  know 
nothing  whatever.  As  far  as  we  are  concerned  there  is  no 
such  thing:  it  has  no  existence:  for  de  non  apparentibus  et 
non  existentibus  eadem  est  ratio. 

It   is   a   mistake,   therefore,   to   speak  about  an   "eternal 

74 


Mind  and  Matter  75 

unchangeable  underlying  substance"  as  I  am  afraid  I  did 
in  the  last  pages  of  Luck  or  Cunning?  but  I  am  not  going  to 
be  at  the  trouble  of  seeing.  For,  if  the  substance  is  eternal 
and  unknowable  and  unchangeable,  it  is  tantamount  to  noth- 
ing. Nothing  can  be  nearer  non-existence  than  eternal  un- 
knowableness  and  unchangeableness. 

If,  on  the  other  hand,  the  substance  changes,  then  it  is 
not  unknowable,  or  uncognisable,  for  by  cognising  its  changes 
we  cognise  it.  Changes  are  the  only  things  that  we  can 
cognise.  Besides,  we  cannot  have  substance  changing  without 
condition  changing,  and  if  we  could  we  might  as  well  ignore 
condition.  Does  it  not  seem  as  though,  since  the  motions  or 
states  are  all  that  we  cognise,  they  should  be  all  that  we 
need  take  account  of?  Change  of  condition  is  change  of 
substance.  Then  what  do  we  want  with  substance?  Why 
have  two  ideas  when  one  will  do? 

I  suppose  it  has  all  come  about  because  there  are  so  many 
tables  and  chairs  and  stones  that  appear  not  to  be  moving, 
and  this  gave  us  the  idea  of  a  solid  substance  without  any 
motion  in  it. 

How  would  it  be  to  start  with  motion  approximately 
patent,  and  motion  approximately  latent  (absolute  patency 
and  absolute  latency  being  unattainable),  and  lay  down  that 
motion  latent  as  motion  becomes  patent  as  substance,  or 
matter  of  chair-and-table  order;  and  that  when  patent  as 
motion  it  is  latent  as  matter  and  substance  ? 

I  am  only  just  recovering  from  severe  influenza  and  have 
no  doubt  I  have  been  writing  nonsense. 

Matter  and  Mind 

i 

People  say  we  can  conceive  the  existence  of  matter  and 
the  existence  of  mind.  I  doubt  it.  I  doubt  how  far  we  have 
any  definite  conception  of  mind  or  of  matter,  pure  and 
simple. 

What  is  meant  by  conceiving  a  thing  or  understanding  it? 

When  we  hear  of  a  piece  of  matter  instinct  with  mind,  as 
protoplasm,  for  example,  there  certainly  comes  up  before 
our  closed  eyes  an  idea,  a  picture  which  we  imagine  to  bear 
some  resemblance  to  the  thing  we  are  hearing  of.  But  when 


76  Mind  and  Matter 

we  try  to  think  of  matter  apart  from  every  attribute  of 
matter  (and  this  I  suspect  comes  ultimately  to  "apart  from 
every  attribute  of  mind")  we  get  no  image  before  our  closed 
eyes — we  realise  nothing  to  ourselves.  Perhaps  we  surrep- 
titiously introduce  some  little  attribute,  and  then  we  think 
we  have  conceived  of  matter  pure  and  simple,  but  this  I 
think  is  as  far  as  we  can  go.  The  like  holds  good  for  mind : 
we  must  smuggle  in  a  little  matter  before  we  get  any  definite 
idea  at  all. 

ii 

Matter  and  mind  are  as  heat  and  cold,  as  life  and  death, 
certainty  and  uncertainty,  union  and  separateness.  There  is 
no  absolute  heat,  life,  certainty,  union,  nor  is  there  any 
absolute  cold,  death,  uncertainty  or  separateness. 

We  can  conceive  of  no  ultimate  limit  beyond  which  a 
thing  cannot  become  either  hotter  or  colder,  there  is  no 
limit;  there  are  degrees  of  heat  and  cold,  but  there  is  no 
heat  so  great  that  we  cannot  fancy  its  becoming  a  little 
hotter,  that  is  we  cannot  fancy  its  not  having  still  a  few 
degrees  of  cold  in  it  which  can  be  extracted.  Heat  and  cold 
are  always  relative  to  one  another,  they  are  never  absolute. 
So  with  life  and  death,  there  is  neither  perfect  life  nor  perfect 
death,  but  in  the  highest  life  there  is  some  death  and  in  the 
lowest  death  there  is  still  some  life.  The  fraction  is  so  small 
that  in  practice  it  may  and  must  be  neglected ;  it  is  neglected, 
however,  not  as  of  right  but  as  of  grace,  and  the  right  to 
insist  on  it  is  never  finally  and  indefeasibly  waived. 

iii 

An  energy  is  a  soul — a  something  working  in  us. 

As  we  cannot  imagine  heat  apart  from  something  which  is 
hot,  nor  motion  without  something  that  is  moving,  so  we 
cannot  imagine  an  energy,  or  working  power,  without  matter 
through  which  it  manifests  itself. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  cannot  imagine  matter  without 
thinking  of  it  as  capable  of  some  kind  of  working  power  or 
energy — we  cannot  think  of  matter  without  thinking  of  it  as 
in  some  way  ensouled. 

iv 

Matter  and  mind  form  one  another,  i.e.  they  give  to  one 
another  the  form  in  which  we  see  them.  They  are  the  help- 


Mind  and  Matter  77 

meets  to  one  another  that  cross  each  other  and  undo  each 
other  and,  in  the  undoing,  do  and,  in  the  doing,  undo,  and  so 
see-saw  ad  infinitum. 

Organic  and  Inorganic 

Animals  and  plants  cannot  understand  our  business,  so  we 
have  denied  that  they  can  understand  their  own.  What  we 
call  inorganic  matter  cannot  understand  the  animals'  and 
plants'  business,  we  have  therefore  denied  that  it  can  under- 
stand anything  whatever. 

What  we  call  inorganic  is  not  so  really,  but  the  organisa- 
tion is  too  subtle  for  our  senses  or  for  any  of  those  appliances 
with  which  we  assist  them.  It  is  deducible  however  as  a 
necessity  by  an  exercise  of  the  reasoning  faculties. 

People  looked  at  glaciers  for  thousands  of  years  before 
they  found  out  that  ice  was  a  fluid,  so  it  has  taken  them  and 
will  continue  to  take  them  not  less  before  they  see  that  the 
inorganic  is  not  wholly  inorganic. 

The  Power  to  make  Mistakes 

This  is  one  of  the  criteria  of  life  as  we  commonly  think  of 
it.  If  oxygen  could  go  wrong  and  mistake  some  other  gas 
for  hydrogen  and  thus  learn  not  to  mistake  it  any  more,  we 
should  say  oxygen  was  alive.  The  older  life  is,  the  more 
unerring  it  becomes  in  respect  of  things  about  which  it  is 
conversant — the  more  like,  in  fact,  it  becomes  to  such  a 
thing  as  the  force  of  gravity,  both  as  regards  unerringness 
and  unconsciousness. 

Is  life  such  a  force  as  gravity  in  process  of  formation,  and 
was  gravity  once — or  rather,  were  things  once  liable  to  make 
mistakes  on  such  a  subject  as  gravity? 

If  any  one  will  tell  me  what  life  is  I  will  tell  him  whether 
the  inorganic  is  alive  or  not. 

The  Omnipresence  of  Intelligence 

A  little  while  ago  no  one  would  admit  that  animals  had 
intelligence.  This  is  now  conceded.  At  any  rate,  then, 
vegetables  had  no  intelligence.  This  is  being  fast  disputed. 


78  Mind  and  Matter 

Even  Darwin  leans  towards  the  view  that  they  have  intelli- 
gence. At  any  rate,  then,  the  inorganic  world  has  not  got 
an  intelligence.  Even  this  is  now  being  denied.  Death  is 
being  defeated  at  all  points.  No  sooner  do  we  think  we  have 
got  a  bona  fide  barrier  than  it  breaks  down.  The  divisions 
between  varieties,  species,  genus,  all  gone;  between  instinct 
and  reason,  gone ;  between  animals  and  plants,  gone ;  between 
man  and  the  lower  animals,  gone;  so,  ere  long,  the  division 
between  organic  and  inorganic  will  go  and  will  take  with  it 
the  division  between  mind  and  matter. 

The  Super-Organic  Kingdom 

As  the  solid  inorganic  kingdom  supervened  upon  the 
gaseous  (vestiges  of  the  old  being,  nevertheless,  carried  over 
into  and  still  persisting  in  the  new)  and  as  the  organic  king- 
dom supervened  upon  the  inorganic  (vestiges  of  the  old  be- 
ing, again,  carried  over  into  and  still  persisting  in  the  new) 
so  a  third  kingdom  is  now  in  process  of  development,  the 
super-organic,  of  which  we  see  the  germs  in  the  less  practical 
and  more  emotional  side  of  our  nature. 

Man,  for  example,  is  the  on1"  creature  that  interests  him- 
self in  his  own  past,  or  foreca  nis  future  to  any  consider' 
able  extent.  This  tendency  I  would  see  as  the  monad  of  a 
new  regime — a  regime  that  will  be  no  more  governed  by  the 
ideas  and  habits  now  prevailing  among  ourselves  than  we 
are  by  those  still  obtaining  among  stones  or  water.  Never- 
theless, if  a  man  be  shot  out  of  a  cannon,  or  fall  from  a  great 
height,  he  is  to  all  intents  and  purposes  a  mere  stone.  Place 
anything  in  circumstances  entirely  foreign  to  its  immediate 
antecedents,  and  those  antecedents  become  non-existent  to 
it,  it  returns  to  what  it  was  before  they  existed,  to  the  last 
stage  that  it  can  recollect  as  at  all  analogous  to  its  present. 

Feeling 

Man  is  a  substance,  he  knows  not  what,  feeling,  he  knows 
not  how,  a  rest  and  unrest  that  he  can  only  in  part  distin- 
guish. He  is  a  substance  feeling  equilibrium  or  want  of 
equilibrium;  that  is  to  say,  he  is  a  substance  in  a  statical 


Mind  and  Matter  79 

or  dynamical  condition  and  feeling  the  passage  from  one 
state  into  the  other. 

Feeling  is  an  art  and,  like  any  other  art,  can  be  acquired 
by  taking  pains.  The  analogy  between  feelings  and  words 
is  very  close.  Both  have  their  foundation  in  volition  and 
deal  largely  in  convention ;  as  we  should  not  be  word-ridden 
so  neither  should  we  be  feeling-ridden;  feelings  can  deceive 
us;  they  can  lie;  they  can  be  used  in  a  non-natural,  arti- 
ficial sense;  they  can  be  forced;  they  can  carry  us  away; 
they  can  be  restrained. 

When  the  surroundings  are  familiar,  we  know  the  right 
feeling  and  feel  it  accordingly,  or  if  "we"  (that  is  the  central 
government  of  our  personality)  do  not  feel  it,  the  subordinate 
departmental  personality,  whose  business  it  is,  feels  it  in  the 
usual  way  and  then  goes  on  to  something  else.  When  the 
surroundings  are  less  familiar  and  the  departmental  person- 
ality cannot  deal  with  them,  the  position  is  reported  through 
the  nervous  system  to  the  central  government  which  is  fre- 
quently at  a  loss  to  know  what  feeling  to  apply.  Sometimes 
it  happens  to  discern  the  right  feeling  and  apply  it,  some- 
times it  hits  upon  an  inappropriate  one  and  is  thus  induced 
to  proceed  from  solecism  to  solecism  till  the  consequences 
lead  to  a  crisis  from  which  x.we  recover  and  which,  then  be- 
coming a  leading  case,  fohrtftone  of  the  decisions  on  which 
our  future  action  is  based.  Sometimes  it  applies  a  feeling 
that  is  too  inappropriate,  as  when  the  position  is  too  horribly 
novel  for  us  to  have  had  any  experience  that  can  guide  the 
central  government  in  knowing  how  to  feel  about  it,  and  this 
results  in  a  cessation  of  the  effort  involved  in  trying  to  feel. 
Hence  we  may  hope  that  the  most  horrible  apparent  suffering 
is  not  felt  beyond  a  certain  point,  but  is  passed  through  un- 
consciously under  a  natural,  automatic  anaesthetic — the  uncon- 
sciousness, in  extreme  cases,  leading  to  death. 

It  is  generally  held  that  animals  feel ;  it  will  soon  be 
generally  held  that  plants  feel;  after  that  it  will  be  held 
that  stones  also  can  feel.  For,  as  no  matter  is  so  organic 
that  there  is  not  some  of  the  inorganic  in  it,  so,  also,  no 
matter  is  so  inorganic  that  there  is  not  some  of  the  organic 
in  it.  We  know  that  we  have  nerves  and  that  we  feel,  it 
does  not  follow  that  other  things  do  not  feel  because  they 
have  no  nerves — it  only  follows  that  they  do  not  feel  as  we 


8o  Mind  and  Matter 

do.  The  difference  between  the  organic  and  the  inorganic 
kingdoms  will  some  day  be  seen  to  lie  in  the  greater  power 
of  discriminating  its  feelings  which  is  possessed  by  the 
former.  Both  are  made  of  the  same  universal  substance, 
but,  in  the  case  of  the  organic  world,  this  substance  is 
able  tc  feel  more  fully  and  discreetly  and  to  show  us  that 
it  feels. 

.  Animals  and  plants,  as  they  advance  in  the  scale  of  life, 
differentiate  their  feelings  more  and  more  highly;  they 
record  them  better  and  recognise  them  more  readily.  They 
get  to  know  what  they  are  doing  and  feeling,  not  step  by  step 
only,  nor  sentence  by  sentence,  but  in  long  flights,  forming 
chapters  and  whole  books  of  action  and  sensation.  The 
difference  as  regards  feeling  between  man  and  the  lower 
animals  is  one  of  degree  and  not  of  kind.  The  inorganic  is 
less  expert  in  differentiating  its  feelings,  therefore  its  memory 
of  them  must  be  less  enduring;  it  cannot  re-cognise  what  it 
could  scarcely  cognise.  One  might  as  well  for  some  purposes, 
perhaps,  say  at  once,  as  indeed  people  generally  do  for  most 
purposes,  that  the  inorganic  does  not  feel;  nevertheless  the 
somewhat  periphrastic  way  of  putting  it,  by  saying  that  the 
inorganic  feels  but  does  not  know,  or  knows  only  very  slightly, 
how  to  differentiate  its  feelings,  has  the  advantage  of  ex- 
pressing the  fact  that  feeling  depends  upon  differentiation 
and  sense  of  relation  inter  se  of  the  things  differentiated — a 
fact  which,  if  never  expressed,  is  apt  to  be  lost  sight  of. 

As,  therefore,  human  discrimination  is  to  that  of  the  lower 
animals,  so  the  discrimination  of  the  lower  animals  and 
plants  is  to  that  of  inorganic  things.  In  each  case  it  is  greater 
discriminating  power  (and  this  is  mental  power)  that  under- 
lies the  differentiation,  but  in  no  case  can  there  be  a  denial 
of  mental  power  altogether. 

Opinion  and  Matter 

Moral  force  and  material  force  do  pass  into  one  another ; 
a  conflict  of  opinion  often  ends  in  a  fight.  Putting  it  the 
other  way,  there  is  no  material  conflict  without  attendant 
clash  of  opinion.  Opinion  and  matter  act  and  react  as  do  all 
things  else;  they  come  up  hand  in  hand  out  of  something 
which  is  both  and  neither,  but,  so  far  as  we  can  catch  sight 


Mind  and  Matter  81 

of  either  first  on  our  mental  horizon,  it  is  opinion  that  is  the 
prior  of  the  two. 

Moral  Influence 

The  caracal  lies  on  a  shelf  in  its  den  in  the  Zoological 
Gardens  quietly  licking  its  fur.  I  go  up  and  stand  near  it. 
It  makes  a  face  at  me.  I  come  a  little  nearer.  It  makes  a 
worse  face  and  raises  itself  up  on  its  haunches.  I  stand  and 
look.  It  jumps  down  from  its  shelf  and  makes  as  if  it  in- 
tended to  go  for  me.  I  move  back.  The  caracal  has  exerted  a 
moral  influence  over  me  which  I  have  been  unable  to  resist. 

Moral  influence  means  persuading  another  that  one  can 
make  that  other  more  uncomfortable  than  that  other  can 
make  oneself. 

Mental  and  Physical  Pabulum 

When  we  go  up  to  the  shelves  in  the  reading-room  of  the 
British  Museum,  how  like  it  is  to  wasps  flying  up  and  down 
an  apricot  tree  that  is  trained  against  a  wall,  or  cattle  coming 
down  to  drink  at  a  pool ! 

Eating  and  Proselytising 

All  eating  is  a  kind  of  proselytising — a  kind  of  dogmatising 
— a  maintaining  that  the  eater's  way  of  looking  at  things  is 
better  than  the  eatee's.  We  convert  the  food,  or  try  to  do 
so,  to  our  own  way  of  thinking,  and,  when  it  sticks  to  its  own 
opinion  and  refuses  to  be  converted,  we  say  it  disagrees  with 
us.  An  animal  that  refuses  to  let  another  eat  it  has  the 
courage  of  its  convictions  and,  if  it  gets  eaten,  dies  a  martyr 
to  them.  So  we  can  only  proselytise  fresh  meat,  the  con- 
victions of  putrid  meat  begin  to  be  too  strong  for  us. 

It  is  good  for  a  man  that  he  should  not  be  thwarted — 
that  he  should  have  his  own  way  as  far,  and  with  as  little 
difficulty,  as  possible.  Cooking  is  good  because  it  makes 
matters  easier  by  unsettling  the  meat's  mind  and  preparing 
it  for  new  ideas.  All  food  must  first  be  prepared  for  us  by 
animals  and  plants,  or  we  cannot  assimilate  it;  and  so 
thoughts  are  more  easily  assimilated  that  have  been  already 
digested  by  other  minds.  A  man  should  avoid  converse  with 


82  Mind  and  Matter 

things  that  have  been  stunted  or  starved,  and  should  not  eat 
such  meat  as  has  been  overdriven  or  underfed  or  afflicted 
with  disease,  nor  should  he  touch  fruit  or  vegetables  that 
have  not  been  well  grown. 

Sitting  quiet  after  eating  is  akin  to  sitting  still  during 
divine  service  so  as  not  to  disturb  the  congregation.  We  are 
catechising  and  converting  our  proselytes,  and  there  should 
be  no  row.  As  we  get  older  we  must  digest  more  quietly 
still,  our  appetite  is  less,  our  gastric  juices  are  no  longer  so 
eloquent,  they  have  lost  that  cogent  fluency  which  carried 
away  all  that  came  in  contact  with  it.  They  have  become 
sluggish  and  unconciliatory.  This  is  what  happens  to  any 
man  when  he  suffers  from  an  attack  of  indigestion. 

Sea-Sickness 

Or,  indeed,  any  other  sickness  is  the  inarticulate  expres- 
sion of  the  pain  we  feel  on  seeing  a  proselyte  escape  us  just 
as  we  were  on  the  point  of  converting  it. 

Indigestion 

This,  as  I  have  said  above,  may  be  due  to  the  naughtiness 
of  the  stiff-necked  things  that  we  have  eaten,  or  to  the  poverty 
of  our  own  arguments ;  but  it  may  also  arise  from  an  attempt 
on  the  part  of  the  stomach  to  be  too  damned  clever,  and  to 
depart  from  precedent  inconsiderately.  The  healthy  stomach 
is  nothing  if  not  conservative.  Few  radicals  have  good 
digestions. 

Assimilation  and  Persecution 

We  cannot  get  rid  of  persecution;  if  we  feel  at  all  we 
must  persecute  something;  the  mere  acts  of  feeding  and 
growing  are  acts  of  persecution.  Our  aim  should  be  to 
persecute  nothing  but  such  things  as  are  absolutely  incapable 
of  resisting  us.  Man  is  the  only  animal  that  can  remain  on 
friendly  terms  with  the  victims  he  intends  to  eat  until  he 
eats  them. 

Matter  Infinitely  Subdivisible 

We  must  suppose  it  to  be  so,  but  it  does  not  follow  that 
we  can  know  anything  about  it  if  it  is  divided  into  pieces 


Mind  and  Matter  83 

smaller  than  a  certain  size;  and,  if  we  can  know  nothing 
about  it  when  so  divided,  then,  qua  us,  it  has  no  existence 
and  therefore  matter,  qua  us,  is  not  infinitely  subdivisible. 

Differences 

We  often  say  that  things  differ  in  degree  but  not  in  kind, 
as  though  there  were  a  fixed  line  at  which  degree  ends  and 
kind  begins.  There  is  no  such  line.  All  differences  resolve 
themselves  into  differences  of  degree.  Everything  can  in 
the  end  be  united  with  everything  by  easy  stages  if  a  way 
long  enough  and  round-about  enough  be  taken.  Hence  to 
the  metaphysician  everything  will  become  one,  being  united 
with  everything  else  by  degrees  so  subtle  that  there  is  no 
escape  from  seeing  the  universe  as  a  single  whole.  This  in 
theory;  but  in  practice  it  would  get  us  into  such  a  mess 
that  we  had  better  go  on  talking  about  differences  of  kind  as 
well  as  of  degree. 

Union  and  Separation 

In  the  closest  union  there  is  still  some  separate  existence 
of  component  parts;  in  the  most  complete  separation  there 
is  still  a  reminiscence  of  union.  When  they  are  most  sepa- 
rate, the  atoms  seem  to  bear  in  mind  that  they  may  one  day 
have  to  come  together  again;  when  most  united,  they  still 
remember  that  they  may  come  to  fall  out  some  day  and  do 
not  give  each  other  their  full,  unreserved  confidence. 

The  difficulty  is  how  to  get  unity  and  separateness  at  one 
and  the  same  time.  The  two  main  ideas  underlying  all 
action  are  desire  for  closer  unity  and  desire  for  more  sepa- 
rateness. Nature  is  the  puzzled  sense  of  a  vast  number  of 
things  which  feel  they  are  in  an  illogical  position  and  should 
be  more  either  of  one  thing  or  the  other  than  they  are.  So 
they  will  first  be  this  and  then  that,  and  act  and  re-act  and 
keep  the  balance  as  near  equal  as  they  can,  yet  they  know  all 
the  time  that  it  isn't  right  and,  as  they  incline  one  way  or  the 
other,  they  will  love  or  hate. 

When  we  love,  we  draw  what  we  love  closer  to  us ;  when 
we  hate  a  thing,  we  fling  it  away  from  us.  All  disruption 
and  dissolution  is  a  mode  of  hating;  and  all  that  we  call 
affinity  is  a  mode  of  loving. 


84  Mind  and  Matter 

The  puzzle  which  puzzles  every  atom  is  the  puzzle  which 
puzzles  ourselves — a  conflict  of  duties — our  duty  towards 
ourselves,  and  our  duty  as  members  of  a  body  politic.  It 
is  swayed  by  its  sense  of  being  a  separate  thing — of  having 
a  life  to  itself  which  nothing  can  share;  it  is  also  swayed 
by  the  feeling  that,  in  spite  of  this,  it  is  only  part  of  an  indi- 
viduality which  is  greater  than  itself  and  which  absorbs  it. 
Its  action  will  vary  with  the  predominance  of  either  of  these 
two  states  of  opinion. 

Unity  and  Multitude 

We  can  no  longer  separate  things  as  we  once  could :  every- 
thing tends  towards  unity;  one  thing,  one  action,  in  one 
place,  at  one  time.  On  the  other  hand,  we  can  no  longer 
unify  things  as  we  once  could;  we  are  driven  to  ultimate 
atoms,  each  one  of  which  is  an  individuality.  So  that  we 
have  an  infinite  multitude  of  things  doing  an  infinite  multi- 
tude of  actions  in  infinite  time  and  space;  and  yet  they  are 
not  many  things,  but  one  thing. 

The  Atom 

The  idea  of  an  indivisible,  ultimate  atom  is  inconceivable 
by  the  lay  mind.  If  we  can  conceive  an  idea  of  the  atom 
at  all,  we  can  conceive  it  as  capable  of  being  cut  in  half; 
indeed,  we  cannot  conceive  it  at  all  unless  we  so  conceive 
it.  The  only  true  atom,  the  only  thing  which  we  cannot 
subdivide  and  cut  in  half,  is  the  universe.  We  cannot  cut  a 
bit  off  the  universe  and  put  it  somewhere  else.  Therefore, 
the  universe  is  a  true  atom  and,  indeed,  is  the  smallest  piece 
of  indivisible  matter  which  our  minds  can  conceive ;  and  they 
cannot  conceive  it  any  more  than  they  can  the  indivisible, 
ultimate  atom. 

Our  Cells 

A  string  of  young  ducklings  as  they  sidle  along  through 
grass  beside  a  ditch — how  like  they  are  to  a  single  serpent! 
I  said  in  Life  and  Habit  that  a  colossal  being,  looking  at  the 
earth  through  a  microscope,  would  probably  think  the  ants 
and  flies  of  one  year  the  same  as  those  of  the  preceding  year. 


Mind  and  Matter  85 

I  should  have  added : — So  we  think  we  are  composed  of  the 
same  cells  from  year  to  year,  whereas  in  truth  the  cells  are  a 
succession  of  generations.  The  most  continuous,  homo- 
geneous things  we  know  are  only  like  a  lot  of  cow-bells  on  an 
alpine  pasture. 

Nerves  and  Postmen 

A  letter,  so  long  as  it  is  connected  with  one  set  of  nerves, 
is  one  thing;  loose  it  from  connection  with  those  nerves — 
open  your  fingers  and  drop  it  in  the  opening  of  a  pillar  box — 
and  it  becomes  part  and  parcel  of  another  nervous  system. 
Letters  in  transitu  contain  all  manner  of  varied  stimuli  and 
shocks,  yet  to  the  postman,  who  is  the  nerve  that  conveys 
them,  they  are  all  alike,  except  as  regards  mere  size  and 
weight.  I  should  think,  therefore,  that  our  nerves  and  ganglia 
really  see  no  difference  in  the  stimuli  that  they  convey. 

And  yet  the  postman  does  see  some  difference:  he  knows 
a  business  letter  from  a  valentine  at  a  glance  and  practice 
teaches  him  to  know  much  else  which  escapes  ourselves. 
Who,  then,  shall  say  what  the  nerves  and  ganglia  know  and 
what  they  do  not  know  ?  True,  to  us,  as  we  think  of  a  piece 
of  brain  inside  our  own  heads,  it  seems  as  absurd  to  consider 
that  it  knows  anything  at  all  as  it  seems  to  consider  that  a 
hen's  egg  knows  anything;  but  then  if  the  brain  could  see  us, 
perhaps  the  brain  might  say  it  was  absurd  to  suppose  that  that 
thing  could  know  this  or  that.  Besides  what  is  the  self  of 
which  we  say  that  we  are  self-conscious?  No  one  can  say 
what  it  is  that  we  are  conscious  of.  This  is  one  of  the  things 
which  lie  altogether  outside  the  sphere  of  words. 

The  postman  can  open  a  letter  if  he  likes  and  know  all 
about  the  message  he  is  conveying,  but,  if  he  does  this,  he  is 
diseased  qua  postman.  So,  maybe,  a  nerve  might  open  a 
stimulus  or  a  shock  on  the  way  sometimes,  but  it  would  not 
be  a  good  nerve. 

Night-Shirts  and  Babies 

On  Hindhead,  last  Easter,  we  saw  a  family  wash  hung  out 
to  dry.  There  were  papa's  two  great  night-shirts  and 
mamma's  two  lesser  night-gowns  and  then  the  children's 
smaller  articles  of  clothing  and  mamma's  drawers  and  the 
girls'  drawers,  all  full  swollen  with  a  strong  north-east  wind. 


86  Mind  and  Matter 

But  mamma's  night-gown  was  not  so  well  pinned  on  and, 
instead  of  being  full  of  steady  wind  like  the  others,  kept  blow- 
ing up  and  down  as  though  she  were  preaching  wildly.  We 
stood  and  laughed  for  ten  minutes.  The  housewife  came  to 
the  window  and  wondered  at  us,  but  we  could  not  resist  the 
pleasure  of  watching  the  absurdly  life-like  gestures  which 
the  night-gowns  made.  I  should  like  a  Santa  Famiglia  with 
clothes  drying  in  the  background. 

A  love  story  might  be  told  in  a  series  of  sketches  of  the 
clothes  of  two  families  hanging  out  to  dry  in  adjacent  gar- 
dens. Then  a  gentleman's  night-shirt  from  one  garden,  and  a 
lady's  night-gown  from  the  other  should  be  shown  hanging 
in  a  third  garden  by  themselves.  By  and  by  there  should  be 
added  a  little  night-shirt. 

A  philosopher  might  be  tempted,  on  seeing  the  little  night- 
shirt, to  suppose  that  the  big  night-shirts  had  made  it.  What 
we  do  is  much  the  same,  for  the  body  of  a  baby  is  not  much 
more  made  by  the  two  old  babies,  after  whose  pattern  it 
has  cut  itself  out,  than  the  little  night-shirt  is  made  by  the 
big  ones.  The  thing  that  makes  either  the  little  night-shirt 
or  the  little  baby  is  something  about  which  we  know  nothing 
whatever  at  all. 

Our  Organism 

Man  is  a  walking  tool-box,  manufactory,  workshop  and 
bazaar  worked  from  behind  the  scenes  by  someone  or  some- 
thing that  we  never  see.  We  are  so  used  to  never  seeing  more 
than  the  tools,  and  these  work  so  smoothly,  that  we  call 
them  the  workman  himself,  making  much  the  same  mistake 
as  though  we  should  call  the  saw  the  carpenter.  The  only 
workman  of  whom  we  know  anything  at  all  is  the  one  that 
runs  ourselves  and  even  this  is  not  perceivable  by  any  of  our 
gross  palpable  senses. 

The  senses  seem  to  be  the  link  between  mind  and  matter — 
never  forgetting  that  we  can  never  have  either  mind  or  matter 
pure  and  without  alloy  of  the  other. 

Beer  and  My  Cat 

Spilt  beer  or  water  seems  sometimes  almost  human  in  its 
uncertainty  whether  or  no  it  is  worth  while  to  get  ever  such 


Mind  and  Matter  87 

a  little  nearer  to  the  earth's  centre  by  such  and  such  a  slight 
trickle  forward. 

I  saw  my  cat  undecided  in  his  mind  whether  he  should  get 
up  on  the  table  and  steal  the  remains  of  my  dinner  or  not. 
The  chair  was  some  eighteen  inches  away  with  its  back 
towards  the  table,  so  it  was  a  little  troublesome  for  him  to 
get  his  feet  first  on  the  bar  and  then  on  the  table.  He  was 
not  at  all  hungry  but  he  tried,  saw  it  would  not  be  quite 
easy  and  gave  it  up ;  then  he  thought  better  of  it  and  tried 
again,  and  saw  again  that  it  was  not  all  perfectly  plain 
sailing;  and  so  backwards  and  forwards  with  the  first-he- 
would-and-then-he-wouldn'tism  of  a  mind  so  nearly  in  equi- 
librium that  a  hair's  weight  would  turn  the  scale  one  way  or 
the  other. 

I  thought  how  closely  it  resembled  the  action  of  beer 
trickling  on  a  slightly  sloping  table. 

The  Union  Bank 

There  is  a  settlement  in  the  Union  Bank  building,  Chancery 
Lane,  which  has  made  three  large  cracks  in  the  main  door 
steps.  I  remember  these  cracks  more  than  twenty  years  ago, 
just  after  the  bank  was  built,  as  mere  thin  lines  and  now  they 
must  be  some  half  an  inch  wide  and  are  still  slowly  widening. 
They  have  altered  very  gradually,  but  not  an  hour  or  a  minute 
has  passed  without  a  groaning  and  travailing  together  on  the 
part  of  every  stone  and  piece  of  timber  in  the  building  to 
settle  how  a  modus  vwendi  should  be  arrived  at.  This  is  why 
the  crack  is  said  to  be  caused  by  a  settlement — some  parts 
of  the  building  willing  this  and  some  that,  and  the  battle 
going  on,  as  even  the  steadiest  and  most  unbroken  battles 
must  go,  by  fits  and  starts  which,  though  to  us  appearing 
as  an  even  tenor,  would,  if  we  could  see  them  under  a  micro- 
scope, prove  to  be  a  succession  of  bloody  engagements  be- 
tween regiments  that  sometimes  lost  and  sometimes  won. 
Sometimes,  doubtless,  strained  relations  have  got  settled  by 
peaceful  arbitration  and  reference  to  the  solicitors  of  the 
contending  parts  without  open  visible  rupture ;  at  other 
times,  again,  discontent  has  gathered  on  discontent  as  the 
snow  upon  a  sub-alpine  slope,  flake  by  flake,  till  the  last  is 
one  too  many  and  the  whole  comes  crashing  down — 


88  Mind  and  Matter 

whereon  the  cracks  have  opened  some  minute  fraction  of  an 
inch  wider. 

Of  this  we  see  nothing.  All  we  note  is  that  a  score  of  years 
have  gone  by  and  that  the  cracks  are  rather  wider.  So, 
doubtless,  if  the  materials  of  which  the  bank  is  built  could 
speak,  they  would  say  they  knew  nothing  of  the  varied  inter- 
ests that  sometimes  coalesce  and  sometimes  conflict  within 
the  building.  The  joys  of  the  rich  depositor,  the  anguish  of 
the  bankrupt  are  nothing  to  them;  the  stream  of  people 
coming  in  and  going  out  is  as  steady,  continuous  a  thing  to 
them  as  a  blowing  wind  or  a  running  river  to  ourselves ;  all 
they  know  or  care  about  is  that  they  have  a  trifle  more  weight 
of  books  and  clerks  and  bullion  than  they  once  had,  and  that 
this  hinders  them  somewhat  in  their  effort  after  a  permanent 
settlement. 

The  Unity  of  Nature 

I  meet  a  melancholy  old  Savoyard  playing  on  a  hurdy- 
gurdy,  grisly,  dejected,  dirty,  with  a  look  upon  him  as  though 
the  iron  had  long  since  entered  into  his  soul.  It  is  a  frosty 
morning  but  he  has  very  little  clothing,  and  there  is  a  dumb 
despairing  look  about  him  which  is  surely  genuine.  There 
passes  him  a  young  butcher  boy  with  his  tray  of  meat  upon 
his  shoulder.  He  is  ruddy,  lusty,  full  of  life  and  health  and 
spirits,  and  he  vents  these  in  a  shrill  whistle  which  eclipses 
the  hurdy-gurdy  of  the  Savoyard. 

The  like  holds  good  with  the  horses  and  cats  and  dogs 
which  I  meet  daily,  with  the  flies  in  window  panes  and  with 
plants,  some  are  successful,  others  have  now  passed  their 
prime.  Look  at  the  failures  per  se  and  they  make  one  very 
unhappy,  but  it  helps  matters  to  look  at  them  in  their  capaci- 
ties as  parts  of  a  whole  rather  than  as  isolated. 

I  cannot  see  things  round  about  me  without  feeling  that 
they  are  all  parts  of  one  whole  which  is  trying  to  do  some- 
thing; it  has  not  perhaps  a  perfectly  clear  idea  of  what  it  is 
trying  after,  but  it  is  doing  its  best.  I  see  old  age,  decay  and 
failure  as  the  relaxation,  after  effort,  of  a  muscle  in  the  cor- 
poration of  things,  or  as  a  tentative  effort  in  a  wrong  direc- 
tion, or  as  the  dropping  off  of  particles  of  skin  from  a  healthy 
limb.  This  dropping  off  is  the  death  of  any  given  generation 


Mind  and  Matter  89 

of  our  cells  as  they  work  their  way  nearer  and  nearer  to  our 
skins  and  then  get  rubbed  off  and  go  away.  It  is  as  though  we 
sent  people  to  live  nearer  and  nearer  the  churchyard  the  older 
they  grew.  As  for  the  skin  that  is  shed,  in  the  first  place  it 
has  had  its  turn,  in  the  second  it  starts  anew  under  fresh  aus- 
pices, for  it  can  at  no  time  cease  to  be  part  of  the  universe, 
it  must  always  live  in  one  way  or  another. 

Croesus  and  His  Kitchen-Maid 

I  want  people  to  see  either  their  cells  as  less  parts  of  them- 
selves than  they  do,  or  their  servants  as  more. 

Croesus's  kitchen-maid  is  part  of  him,  bone  of  his  bone  and 
flesh  of  his  flesh,  for  she  eats  what  comes  from  his  table  and, 
being  fed  of  one  flesh,  are  they  not  brother  and  sister  to  one 
another  in  virtue  of  community  of  nutriment  which  is  but 
a  thinly  veiled  travesty  of  descent?  When  she  eats  peas 
with  her  knife,  he  does  so  too ;  there  is  not  a  bit  of  bread  and 
butter  she  puts  into  her  mouth,  nor  a  lump  of  sugar  she  drops 
into  her  tea,  but  he  knoweth  it  altogether,  though  he  knows 
nothing  whatever  about  it.  She  is  en-Croesused  and  he  en- 
scullery-maided  so  long  as  she  remains  linked  to  him  by  the 
golden  chain  which  passes  from  his  pocket  to  hers,  and  which 
is  greatest  of  all  unifiers. 

True,  neither  party  is  aware  of  the  connection  at  all  as  long 
as  things  go  smoothly.  Croesus  no  more  knows  the  name  of, 
or  feels  the  existence  of,  his  kitchen-maid  than  a  peasant  in 
health  knows  about  his  liver ;  nevertheless  he  is  awakened  to 
a  dim  sense  of  an  undefined  something  when  he  pays  his 
grocer  or  his  baker.  She  is  more  definitely  aware  of  him 
than  he  of  her,  but  it  is  by  way  of  an  overshadowing  presence 
rather  than  a  clear  and  intelligent  comprehension.  And 
though  Croesus  does  not  eat  his  kitchen-maid's  meals  other- 
wise than  vicariously,  still  to  eat  vicariously  is  to  eat:  the 
meals  so  eaten  by  his  kitchen-maid  nourish  the  better  ordering 
of  the  dinner  which  nourishes  and  engenders  the  better  order- 
ing of  Croesus  himself.  He  is  fed  therefore  by  the  feeding  of 
his  kitchen-maid. 

And  so  with  sleep.  When  she  goes  to  bed  he,  in  part,  does 
so  too.  When  she  gets  up  and  lays  the  fire  in  the  back- 
kitchen  he,  in  part,  does  so.  He  lays  it  through  her  and  in 


90  Mind  and  Matter 

her,  though  knowing  no  more  what  he  is  doing  than  we  know 
when  we  digest,  but  still  doing  it  as  by  what  we  call  a  reflex 
action.  Qui  facit  per  alium  facit  per  se,  and  when  the  back- 
kitchen  fire  is  lighted  on  Croesus's  behalf,  it  is  Croesus  who 
lights  it,  though  he  is  all  the  time  fast  asleep  in  bed. 

Sometimes  things  do  not  go  smoothly.  Suppose  the 
kitchen-maid  to  be  taken  with  fits  just  before  dinner-time; 
there  will  be  a  reverberating  echo  of  disturbance  throughout 
the  whole  organisation  of  the  palace.  But  the  oftener  she 
has  fits,  the  more  easily  will  the  household  know  what  it  is 
all  about  when  she  is  taken  with  them.  On  the  first  occasion 
Lady  Croesus  will  send  some  one  rushing  down  into  the 
kitchen,  there  will,  in  fact,  be  a  general  flow  of  blood  (i.e. 
household)  to  the  part  affected  (that  is  to  say,  to  the  scullery- 
maid)  ;  the  doctor  will  be  sent  for  and  all  the  rest  of  it.  On 
each  repetition  of  the  fits  the  neighbouring  organs,  reverting 
to  a  more  primary  undifferentiated  condition,  will  discharge 
duties  for  which  they  were  not  engaged,  in  a  manner  for 
which  no  one  would  have  given  them  credit,  and  the  disturb- 
ance will  be  less  and  less  each  time,  till  by  and  by,  at  the 
sound  of  the  crockery  smashing  below,  Lady  Croesus  will  just 
look  up  to  papa  and  say : 

"My  dear,  I  am  afraid  Sarah  has  got  another  fit." 

And  papa  will  say  she  will  probably  be  better  again  soon, 
and  will  go  on  reading  his  newspaper. 

In  course  of  time  the  whole  thing  will  come  to  be  managed 
automatically  downstairs  without  any  reference  either  to 
papa,  the  cerebrum,  or  to  mamma,  the  cerebellum,  or  even 
to  the  medulla  oblongata,  the  housekeeper.  A  precedent  or 
routine  will  be  established,  after  which  everything  will  work 
quite  smoothly. 

But  though  papa  and  mamma  are  unconscious  of  the  reflex 
action  which  has  been  going  on  within  their  organisation, 
the  kitchen-maid  and  the  cells  in  her  immediate  vicinity 
(that  is  to  say  her  fellow-servants)  will  know  all  about  it. 
Perhaps  the  neighbours  will  think  that  nobody  in  the  house 
knows,  and  that  because  the  master  and  mistress  show  no 
sign  of  disturbance  therefore  there  is  no  consciousness.  They 
forget  that  the  scullery-maid  becomes  more  and  more  con- 
scious of  the  fits  if  they  grow  upon  her,  as  they  probably  will, 
and  that  Croesus  and  his  lady  do  show  more  signs  of  con- 


Mind  and  Matter  91 

sciousness,  if  they  are  watched  closely,  than  can  be  detected 
on  first  inspection.  There  is  not  the  same  violent  perturbation 
that  there  was  on  the  previous  occasions,  but  the  tone  of  the 
palace  is  lowered.  A  dinner  party  has  to  be  put  off;  the 
cooking  is  more  homogeneous  and  uncertain,  it  is  less  highly 
differentiated  than  when  the  scullery-maid  was  well;  and 
there  is  a  grumble  when  the  doctor  has  to  be  paid  and  also 
when  the  smashed  crockery  has  to  be  replaced. 

If  Croesus  discharges  his  kitchen-maid  and  gets  another, 
it  is  as  though  he  cut  out  a  small  piece  of  his  finger  and  re- 
placed it  in  due  course  by  growth.  But  even  the  slightest 
cut  may  lead  to  blood-poisoning,  and  so  even  the  dismissal 
of  a  kitchen-maid  may  be  big  with  the  fate  of  empires.  Thus 
the  cook,  a  valued  servant,  may  take  the  kitchen-maid's 
part  and  go  too.  The  next  cook  may  spoil  the  dinner  and 
upset  Croesus's  temper,  and  from  this  all  manner  of  conse- 
quences may  be  evolved,  even  to  the  dethronement  and  death 
of  the  king  himself.  Nevertheless  as  a  general  rule  an  injury 
to  such  a  low  part  of  a  great  monarch's  organism  as  a  kitchen- 
maid  has  no  important  results.  It  is  only  when  we  are  at- 
tacked in  such  vital  organs  as  the  solicitor  or  the  banker  that 
we  need  be  uneasy.  A  wound  in  the  solicitor  is  a  very  serious 
thing,  and  many  a  man  has  died  from  failure  of  his  bank's 
action. 

It  is  certain,  as  we  have  seen,  that  when  the  kitchen-maid 
lights  the  fire  it  is  really  Croesus  who  is  lighting  it,  but  it  is 
less  obvious  that  when  Croesus  goes  to  a  ball  the  scullery-maid 
goes  also.  Still  this  should  be  held  in  the  same  way  as  it 
should  be  also  held  that  she  eats  vicariously  when  Croesus 
dines.  For  he  must  return  the  balls  and  the  dinner  parties 
and  this  comes  out  in  his  requiring  to  keep  a  large  establish- 
ment whereby  the  scullery-maid  retains  her  place  as  part  of 
his  organism  and  is  nourished  and  amused  also. 

On  the  other  hand,  when  Croesus  dies  it  does  not  follow 
that  the  scullery-maid  should  die  at  the  same  time.  She 
may  grow  a  new  Croesus,  as  Croesus,  if  the  maid  dies,  will 
probably  grow  a  new  kitchen-maid,  Croesus's  son  or  successor 
may  take  over  the  kingdom  and  palace,  and  the  kitchen-maid, 
beyond  having  to  wash  up  a  few  extra  plates  and  dishes  at 
coronation  time,  will  know  little  about  the  change.  It  is  as 
though  the  establishment  had  had  its  hair  cut  and  its  beard 


92  Mind  and  Matter 

trimmed;  it  is  smartened  up  a  little,  but  there  is  no  other 
change.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  he  goes  bankrupt,  or  his 
kingdom  is  taken  from  him  and  his  whole  establishment  is 
broken  up  and  dissipated  at  the  auction  mart,  then,  even 
though  not  one  of  its  component  cells  actually  dies,  the 
organism  as  a  whole  does  so,  and  it  is  interesting  to  see  that 
the  lowest,  least  specialised  and  least  highly  differentiated 
parts  of  the  organism,  such  as  the  scullery-maid  and  the 
stable-boys,  most  readily  find  an  entry  into  the  life  of  some 
new  system,  while  the  more  specialised  and  highly  differenti- 
ated parts,  such  as  the  steward,  the  old  housekeeper  and, 
still  more  so,  the  librarian  or  the  chaplain  may  never  be  able 
to  attach  themselves  to  any  new  combination,  and  may  die 
in  consequence.  I  heard  once  of  a  large  builder  who  retired 
unexpectedly  from  business  and  broke  up  his  establishment 
to  the  actual  death  of  several  of  his  older  employes.  So  a  bit 
of  flesh  or  even  a  finger  may  be  taken  from  one  body  and 
grafted  on  to  another,  but  a  leg  cannot  be  grafted ;  if  a  leg  is 
cut  off  it  must  die.  It  may,  however,  be  maintained  that  the 
owner  dies  too,  even  though  he  recovers,  for  a  man  who  has 
lost  a  leg  is  not  the  man  he  was.* 

*  The  five  notes  here  amalgamated  together  into  "Croesus  and  his 
Kitchen-Maid"  were  to  have  been  part  of  an  article  for  the  Universal 
Review,  but,  before  Butler  wrote  it,  the  review  died.  I  suppose,  but  I 
do  not  now  remember,  that  the  article  would  have  been  about  Mind 
and  Matter  or  Organs  and  Tools,  and,  possibly,  all  the  concluding 
notes  of  this  group,  beginning  with  "Our  Cells,"  would  have  been 
introduced  as  illustrations. 


VII 

On  the  Making  of  Music,  Pictures  and 
Books 

Thought  and  Word 
i 

THOUGHT  pure  and  simple  is  as  near  to  God  as  we  can  get; 
it  is  through  this  that  we  are  linked  with  God.  The  highest 
thought  is  ineffable;  it  must  be  felt  from  one  person  to 
another  but  cannot  be  articulated.  All  the  most  essential 
and  thinking  part  of  thought  is  done  without  words  or  con- 
sciousness. It  is  not  till  doubt  and  consciousness  enter  that 
words  become  possible. 

The  moment  a  thing  is  written,  or  even  can  be  written,  and 
reasoned  about,  it  has  changed  its  nature  by  becoming  tangi- 
ble, and  hence  finite,  and  hence  it  will  have  an  end  in  disin- 
tegration. It  has  entered  into  death.  And  yet  till  it  can  be 
thought  about  and  realised  more  or  less  definitely  it  has  not 
entered  into  life.  Both  life  and  death  are  necessary  factors 
of  each  other.  But  our  profoundest  and  most  important 
convictions  are  unspeakable. 

So  it  is  with  unwritten  and  indefinable  codes  of  honour, 
conventions,  art-rules — things  that  can  be  felt  but  not 
explained — these  are  the  most  important,  and  the  less  we 
try  to  understand  them,  or  even  to  think  about  them,  the 
better. 

ii 

Words  are  organised  thoughts,  as  living  forms  are  organ- 
ised actions.  How  a  thought  can  find  embodiment  in  words  is 
nearly,  though  perhaps  not  quite,  as  mysterious  as  how  an 
action  can  find  embodiment  in  form,  and  appears  to  involve  a 

93 


94  On  the  Making  of  Music, 

somewhat    analogous    transformation    and    contradiction    in 
terms. 

There  was  a  time  when  language  was  as  rare  an  accom- 
plishment as  writing  was  in  the  days  when  it  was  first  in- 
vented. Probably  talking  was  originally  confined  to  a  few 
scholars,  as  writing  was  in  the  middle  ages,  and  gradually  be- 
came general.  Even  now  speech  is  still  growing;  poor  folks 
cannot  understand  the  talk  of  educated  people.  Perhaps  read- 
ing and  writing  will  indeed  one  day  come  by  nature.  Analogy 
points  in  this  direction,  and  though  analogy  is  often  mislead- 
ing, it  is  the  least  misleading  thing  we  have. 

iii 

Communications  between  God  and  man  must  always  be 
either  above  words  or  below  them ;  for  with  words  come  in 
translations,  and  all  the  interminable  questions  therewith 
connected. 

iv 

The  mere  fact  that  a  thought  or  idea  can  be  expressed 
articulately  in  words  involves  that  it  is  still  open  to  question ; 
and  the  mere  fact  that  a  difficulty  can  be  definitely  conceived 
involves  that  it  is  open  to  solution. 


We  want  words  to  do  more  than  they  can.  We  try  to  do 
with  them  what  comes  to  very  much  like  trying  to  mend  a 
watch  with  a  pickaxe  or  to  paint  a  miniature  with  a  mop; 
we  expect  them  to  help  us  to  grip  and  dissect  that  which 
in  ultimate  essence  is  as  ungrippable  as  shadow.  Nevertheless 
there  they  are;  we  have  got  to  live  with  them,  and  the  wise 
course  is  to  treat  them  as  we  do  our  neighbours,  and  make 
the  best  and  not  the  worst  of  them.  But  they  are  parvenu 
people  as  compared  with  thought  and  action.  What  we 
should  read  is  not  the  words  but  the  man  whom  we  feel  to  be 
behind  the  words. 

vi 

Words  impede  and  either  kill,  or  are  killed  by,  perfect 
thought;  but  they  are,  as  a  scaffolding,  useful,  if  not  indis- 
pensable, for  the  building  up  of  imperfect  thought  and  helping 
to  perfect  it. 


Pictures  and  Books  95 

vii 

All  words  are  juggles.  To  call  a  thing  a  juggle  of  words  is 
often  a  bigger  juggle  than  the  juggle  it  is  intended  to  complain 
of.  The  question  is  whether  it  is  a  greater  juggle  than  is 
generally  considered  fair  trading. 

viii 

Words  are  like  money ;  there  is  nothing  so  useless,  unless 
when  in  actual  use. 

ix 

Gold  and  silver  coins  are  only  the  tokens,  symbols,  out- 
ward and  visible  signs  and  sacraments  of  money.  When  not 
in  actual  process  of  being  applied  in  purchase  they  are  no 
more  money  than  words  not  in  use  are  language.  Books  are 
like  imprisoned  souls  until  some  one  takes  them  down  from 
a  shelf  and  reads  them.  The  coins  are  potential  money  as 
the  words  are  potential  language,  it  is  the  power  and  will  to 
apply  the  counters  that  make  them  vibrate  with  life;  when 
the  power  and  the  will  are  in  abeyance  the  counters  lie  dead 
as  a  log. 

The  Law 

The  written  law  is  binding,  but  the  unwritten  law  is  much 
more  so.  You  may  break  the  written  law  at  a  pinch  and  on 
the  sly  if  you  can,  but  the  unwritten  law — which  often  com- 
prises the  written — must  not  be  broken.  Not  being  written, 
it  is  not  always  easy  to  know  what  it  is,  but  this  has  got  to  be 
done. 

Ideas 

They  are  like  shadows — substantial  enough  until  we  try 
to  grasp  them. 

Expression 

The  fact  that  every  mental  state  is  intensified  by  expres- 
sion is  of  a  piece  with  the  fact  that  nothing  has  any  existence 
at  all  save  in  its  expression. 

Development 

All  things  are  like  exposed  photographic  plates  that  have 
no  visible  image  on  them  till  they  have  been  developed. 


96          On  the  Making  of  Music, 

Acquired  Characteristics 

If  there  is  any  truth  in  the  theory  that  these  are  inherited 
— and  who  can  doubt  it? — the  eye  and  the  finger  are  but 
the  aspiration,  or  word,  made  manifest  in  flesh. 

Physical  and  Spiritual 

The  bodies  of  many  abandoned  undertakings  lie  rotting 
unburied  up  and  down  the  country  and  their  ghosts  haunt 
the  law-courts. 

Trail  and  Writing 

Before  the  invention  of  writing  the  range  of  one  man's 
influence  over  another  was  limited  to  the  range  of  sight, 
sound  and  scent ;  besides  this  there  was  trail,  of  many  kinds. 
Trail  unintentionally  left  is,  as  it  were,  hidden  sight.  Left 
intentionally,  it  is  the  unit  of  literature.  It  is  the  first  mode 
of  writing,  from  which  grew  that  power  of  extending  men's 
influence  over  one  another  by  the  help  of  written  symbols  of 
all  kinds  without  which  the  development  of  modern  civilisa- 
tion would  have  been  impossible. 

Conveyancing  and  the  Arts 

In  conveyancing  the  ultimately  potent  thing  is  not  the  deed 
but  the  invisible  intention  and  desire  of  the  parties  to  the 
deed;  the  written  document  itself  is  only  evidence  of  this 
intention  and  desire.  So  it  is  with  music,  the  written  notes 
are  not  the  main  thing,  nor  is  even  the  heard  performance; 
these  are  only  evidences  of  an  internal  invisible  emotion  that 
can  be  felt  but  never  fully  expressed.  And  so  it  is  with  the 
words  of  literature  and  with  the  forms  and  colours  of  painting. 

The   Rules   for   Making   Literature,    Music   and 

Pictures 

The  arts  of  the  musician,  the  painter  and  the  writer  are 
essentially  the  same.  In  composing  a  fugue,  after  you  have 
exposed  your  subject,  which  must  not  be  too  unwieldy,  you 
introduce  an  episode  or  episodes  which  must  arise  out  of  your 


Pictures  and  Books  97 

subject.  The  great  thing  is  that  all  shall  be  new,  and  yet 
nothing  new,  at  the  same  time;  the  details  must  minister  to 
the  main  effect  and  not  obscure  it ;  in  other  words,  you  must 
have  a  subject,  develop  it  and  not  wander  from  it  very  far. 
This  holds  just  as  true  for  literature  and  painting  and  for  art 
of  all  kinds. 

No  man  should  try  even  to  allude  to  the  greater  part  of 
what  he  sees  in  his  subject,  and  there  is  hardly  a  limit  to 
what  he  may  omit.  What  is  required  is  that  he  shall  say 
what  he  elects  to  say  discreetly;  that  he  shall  be  quick  to 
see  the  gist  of  a  matter,  and  give  it  pithily  without  either 
prolixity  or  stint  of  words. 

Relative  Importances 

It  is  the  painter's  business  to  help  memory  and  imagination, 
not  to  supersede  them.  He  cannot  put  the  whole  before  the 
spectator,  nothing  can  do  this  short  of  the  thing  itself;  he 
should,  therefore,  not  try  to  realise,  and  the  less  he  looks  as 
if  he  were  trying  to  do  so  the  more  signs  of  judgment  he  will 
show.  His  business  is  to  supply  those  details  which  will  most 
readily  bring  the  whole  before  the  mind  along  with  them. 
He  must  not  give  too  few,  but  it  is  still  more  imperative  on 
him  not  to  give  too  many. 

Seeing,  thought  and  expression  are  rendered  possible  only 
by  the  fact  that  our  minds  are  always  ready  to  compromise 
and  to  take  the  part  for  the  whole.  We  associate  a  number 
of  ideas  with  any  given  object,  and  if  a  few  of  the  most 
characteristic  of  these  are  put  before  us  we  take  the  rest  as 
read,  jump  to  a  conclusion  and  realise  the  whole.  If  we  did 
not  conduct  our  thought  on  this  principle — simplifying  by 
suppression  of  detail  and  breadth  of  treatment — it  would 
take  us  a  twelvemonth  to  say  that  it  was  a  fine  morning  and 
another  for  the  hearer  to  apprehend  our  statement.  Any 
other  principle  reduces  thought  to  an  absurdity. 

All  painting  depends  upon  simplification.  All  simplifica- 
tion depends  upon  a  perception  of  relative  importances.  All 
perception  of  relative  importances  depends  upon  a  just  ap- 
preciation of  which  letters  in  association's  bond  association 
will  most  readily  dispense  with.  This  depends  upon  the 
sympathy  of  the  painter  both  with  his  subject  and  with  him 


98  On  the  Making  of  Music, 

who  is  to  look  at  the  picture.  And  this  depends  upon  a  man's 
common  sense. 

He  therefore  tells  best  in  painting,  as  in  literature,  who 
has  best  estimated  the  relative  values  or  importances  of  the 
more  special  features  characterising  his  subject :  that  is  to 
say,  who  appreciates  most  accurately  how  much  and  how 
fast  each  one  of  them  will  carry,  and  is  at  most  pains  to  give 
those  only  that  will  say  most  in  the  fewest  words  or  touches. 
It  is  here  that  the  most  difficult,  the  most  important,  and  the 
most  generally  neglected  part  of  an  artist's  business  will  be 
found  to  lie. 

The  difficulties  of  doing  are  serious  enough,  nevertheless 
we  can  most  of  us  overcome  them  with  ordinary  perseverance 
for  they  are  small  as  compared  with  those  of  knowing  what 
not  to  do — with  those  of  learning  to  disregard  the  incessant 
importunity  of  small  nobody-details  that  persist  in  trying 
to  thrust  themselves  above  their  betters.  It  is  less  trouble 
to  give  in  to  these  than  to  snub  them  duly  and  keep  them  in 
their  proper  places,  yet  it  is  precisely  here  that  strength  or 
weakness  resides.  It  is  success  or  failure  in  this  respect  that 
constitutes  the  difference  between  the  artist  who  may  claim 
to  rank  as  a  statesman  and  one  who  can  rise  no  higher  than 
a  village  vestryman. 

It  is  here,  moreover,  that  effort  is  most  remunerative. 
For  when  we  feel  that  a  painter  has  made  simplicity  and  sub- 
ordination of  importances  his  first  aim,  it  is  surprising  how 
much  shortcoming  we  will  condone  as  regards  actual  execu- 
tion. Whereas,  let  the  execution  be  perfect,  if  the  details 
given  be  ill-chosen  in  respect  of  relative  importance,  the 
whole  effect  is  lost — it  becomes  top-heavy,  as  it  were,  and 
collapses.  As  for  the  number  of  details  given,  this  does  not 
matter:  a  man  may  give  as  few  or  as  many  as  he  chooses; 
he  may  stop  at  outline,  or  he  may  go  on  to  Jean  Van  Eyck; 
what  is  essential  is  that,  no  matter  how  far  or  how  small  a 
distance  he  may  go,  he  should  have  begun  with  the  most 
important  point  and  added  each  subsequent  feature  in  due 
order  of  importance,  so  that  if  he  stopped  at  any  moment 
there  should  be  no  detail  ungiven  more  important  tha.n 
another  which  has  been  insisted  on. 

Supposing,  by  way  of  illustration,  that  the  details  are  as 
grapes  in  a  bunch,  they  should  be  eaten  from  the  best  grape 


Pictures  and  Books  99 

to  the  next  best,  and  so  on  downwards,  never  eating  a  worse 
grape  while  a  better  one  remains  uneaten. 

Personally,  I  think  that,  as  the  painter  cannot  go  the 
whole  way,  the  sooner  he  makes  it  clear  that  he  has  no  inten- 
tion of  trying  to  do  so  the  better.  When  we  look  at  a  very 
highly  finished  picture  (so  called),  unless  we  are  in  the  hands 
of  one  who  has  attended  successfully  to  the  considerations 
insisted  on  above,  we  feel  as  though  we  were  with  a  trouble- 
some cicerone  who  will  not  let  us  look  at  things  with  our 
own  eyes  but  keeps  intruding  himself  at  every  touch  and 
turn  and  trying  to  exercise  that  undue  influence  upon  us 
which  generally  proves  to  have  been  the  accompaniment  of 
concealment  and  fraud.  This  is  exactly  what  we  feel  with 
Van  Mieris  and,  though  in  a  less  degree,  with  Gerard  Dow; 
whereas  with  Jean  Van  Eyck  and  Metsu,  no  matter  how  far 
they  may  have  gone,  we  find  them  essentially  as  impressionist 
as  Rembrandt  or  Velasquez. 

For  impressionism  only  means  that  due  attention  has  been 
paid  to  the  relative  importances  of  the  impressions  made  by 
the  various  characteristics  of  a  given  subject,  and  that  they 
have  been  presented  to  us  in  order  of  precedence. 

Eating  Grapes  Downwards 

Always  eat  grapes  downwards — that  is,  always  eat  the 
best  grape  first;  in  this  way  there  will  be  none  better  left 
on  the  bunch,  and  each  grape  will  seem  good  down  to  the 
last.  If  you  eat  the  other  way,  you  will  not  have  a  good 
grape  in  the  lot.  Besides,  you  will  be  tempting  Providence 
to  kill  you  before  you  come  to  the  best.  This  is  why  autumn 
seems  better  than  spring:  in  the  autumn  we  are  eating  our 
days  downwards,  in  the  spring  each  day  still  seems  "very 
bad."  People  should  live  on  this  principle  more  than  they 
do,  but  they  do  live  on  it  a  good  deal ;  from  the  age  of,  say, 
fifty  we  eat  our  days  downwards. 

In  New  Zealand  for  a  long  time  I  had  to  do  the  washing-up 
after  each  meal.  I  used  to  do  the  knives  first,  for  it  might 
please  God  to  take  me  before  I  came  to  the  forks,  and  then 
what  a  sell  it  would  have  been  to  have  done  the  forks  rather 
than  the  knives! 


ioo         On  the  Making  of  Music, 


Terseness 

Talking  with  Gogin  last  night,  I  said  that  in  writing  it 
took  more  time  and  trouble  to  get  a  thing  short  than  long. 
He  said  it  was  the  same  in  painting.  It  was  harder  not  to 
paint  a  detail  than  to  paint  it,  easier  to  put  in  all  that  one 
can  see  than  to  judge  what  may  go  without  saying,  omit  it 
and  range  the  irreducible  minima  in  due  order  of  precedence. 
Hence  we  all  lean  towards  prolixity. 

The  difficulty  lies  in  the  nice  appreciation  of  relative 
importances  and  in  the  giving  each  detail  neither  more  nor 
less  than  its  due.  This  is  the  difference  between  Gerard  Dow 
and  Metsu.  Gerard  Dow  gives  all  he  can,  but  unreflectingly ; 
hence  it  does  not  reflect  the  subject  effectively  into  the 
spectator.  We  see  it,  but  it  does  not  come  home  to  us.  Metsu 
on  the  other  hand  omits  all  he  can,  but  omits  intelligently, 
and  his  reflection  excites  responsive  enthusiasm  in  ourselves. 
We  are  continually  trying  to  see  as  much  as  we  can,  and  to 
put  it  down.  More  wisely  we  should  consider  how  much  we 
can  avoid  seeing  and  dispense  with. 

So  it  is  also  in  music.  Cherubini  says  the  number  of 
things  that  can  be  done  in  fugue  with  a  very  simple  subject 
is  endless,  but  that  the  trouble  lies  in  knowing  which  to 
choose  from  all  these  infinite  possibilities. 

As  regards  painting,  any  one  can  paint  anything  in  the 
minute  manner  with  a  little  practice,  but  it  takes  an  exceed- 
ingly able  man  to  paint  so  much  as  an  egg  broadly  and  simply. 
Bearing  in  mind  the  shortness  of  life  and  the  complexity  of 
affairs,  it  stands  to  reason  that  we  owe  most  to  him  who 
packs  our  trunks  for  us,  so  to  speak,  most  intelligently, 
neither  omitting  what  we  are  likely  to  want,  nor  including 
what  we  can  dispense  with,  and  who,  at  the  same  time, 
arranges  things  so  that  they  will  travel  most  safely  and  be 
got  at  most  conveniently.  So  we  speak  of  composition  and 
arrangement  in  all  arts. 

Making  Notes 

My  notes  always  grow  longer  if  I  shorten  them.  I  mean 
the  process  of  compression  makes  them  more  pregnant  and 


Pictures  and  Books  101 

they  breed  new  notes.  I  never  try  to  lengthen  them,  so  I  do 
not  know  whether  they  would  grow  shorter  if  I  did.  Perhaps 
that  might  be  a  good  way  of  getting  them  shorter. 

Shortening 

A  young  author  is  tempted  to  leave  anything  he  has 
written  through  fear  of  not  having  enough  to  say  if  he  goes 
cutting  out  too  freely.  But  it  is  easier  to  be  long  than  short. 
I  have  always  found  compressing,  cutting  out,  and  tersifying 
a  passage  suggest  more  than  anything  else  does.  Things 
pruned  off  in  this  way  are  like  the  heads  of  the  hydra,  two 
grow  for  every  one  that  is  lopped  off. 

Omission 

If  a  writer  will  go  on  the  principle  of  stopping  everywhere 
and  anywhere  to  put  down  his  notes,  as  the  true  painter  will 
stop  anywhere  and  everywhere  to  sketch,  he  will  be  able  to 
cut  down  his  works  liberally.  He  will  become  prodigal  not 
of  writing — any  fool  can  be  this — but  of  omission.  You 
become  brief  because  you  have  more  things  to  say  than  time 
to  say  them  in.  One  of  the  chief  arts  is  that  of  knowing  what 
to  neglect  and  the  more  talk  increases  the  more  necessary 
does  this  art  become. 

Brevity 

Handel's  jig  in  the  ninth  Suite  de  Pieces,  in  G  minor,  is 
very  fine  but  it  is  perhaps  a  little  long.  Probably  Handel  was 
in  a  hurry,  for  it  takes  much  more  time  to  get  a  thing  short 
than  to  leave  it  a  little  long.  Brevity  is  not  only  the  soul  of 
wit,  but  the  soul  of  making  oneself  agreeable  and  of  getting 
on  with  people,  and,  indeed,  of  everything  that  makes  life 
worth  living.  So  precious  a  thing,  however,  cannot  be  got 
without  more  expense  and  trouble  than  most  of  us  have  the 
moral  wealth  to  lay  out. 

Diffuseness 

This  sometimes  helps,  as,  for  instance,  when  the  subject  is 
hard;  words  that  may  be,  strictly  speaking,  unnecessary 


102         On  the  Making  of  Music, 

still  may  make  things  easier  for  the  reader  by  giving  him 
more  time  to  master  the  thought  while  his  eye  is  running 
over  the  verbiage.  So,  a  little  water  may  prevent  a  strong 
drink  from  burning  throat  and  stomach.  A  style  that  is  too 
terse  is  as  fatiguing  as  one  that  is  too  diffuse.  But  when  a 
passage  is  written  a  little  long,  with  consciousness  and  com- 
punction but  still  deliberately,  as  what  will  probably  be  most 
easy  for  the  reader,  it  can  hardly  be  called  diffuse. 

Difficulties  in  Art,  Literature  and  Music 

The  difficult  and  the  unintelligible  are  only  conceivable  at 
all  in  virtue  of  their  catching  on  to  something  less  difficult 
and  less  unintelligible  and,  through  this,  to  things  easily 
done  and  understood.  It  is  at  these  joints  in  their  armour 
that  difficulties  should  be  attacked. 

Never  tackle  a  serious  difficulty  as  long  as  something 
which  must  be  done,  and  about  which  you  see  your  way 
fairly  well,  remains  undone;  the  settling  of  this  is  sure  to 
throw  light  upon  the  way  in  which  the  serious  difficulty  is  to 
be  resolved.  It  is  doing  the  What-you-can  that  will  best  help 
you  to  do  the  What-you-cannot. 

Arrears  of  small  things  to  be  attended  to,  if  allowed  to 
accumulate,  worry  and  depress  like  unpaid  debts.  The  main 
work  should  always  stand  aside  for  these,  not  these  for  the 
main  work,  as  large  debts  should  stand  aside  for  small  ones, 
or  truth  for  common  charity  and  good  feeling.  If  we  attend 
continually  and  promptly  to  the  little  that  we  can  do,  we 
shall  ere  long  be  surprised  to  find  how  little  remains  that  we 
cannot  do. 

Knowledge  is  Power 

Yes,  but  it  must  be  practical  knowledge.  There  is  nothing 
less  powerful  than  knowledge  unattached,  and  incapable  of 
application.  That  is  why  what  little  knowledge  I  have  has 
done  myself  personally  so  much  harm.  I  do  not  know  much, 
but  if  I  knew  a  good  deal  less  than  that  little  I  should  be  far 
more  powerful.  The  rule  should  be  never  to  learn  a  thing 
till  one  is  pretty  sure  one  wants  it,  or  that  one  will  want  it 
before  long  so  badly  as  not  to  be  able  to  get  on  without  it. 
This  is  what  sensible  people  do  about  money,  and  there  is  no 


Pictures  and  Books  103 

reason  why  people  should  throw  away  their  time  and  trouble 
more  than  their  money.  There  are  plenty  of  things  that  most 
boys  would  give  their  ears  to  know,  these  and  these  only  are 
the  proper  things  for  them  to  sharpen  their  wits  upon. 

If  a  boy  is  idle  and  does  not  want  to  learn  anything  at  all, 
the  same  principle  should  guide  those  who  have  the  care  of 
him — he  should  never  be  made  to  learn  anything  till  it  is 
pretty  obvious  that  he  cannot  get  on  without  it.  This  will 
save  trouble  both  to  boys  and  teachers,  moreover  it  will  be 
far  more  likely  to  increase  a  boy's  desire  to  learn.  I  know  in 
my  own  case  no  earthly  power  could  make  me  learn  till  I  had 
my  head  given  me;  and  nothing  has  been  able  to  stop  me 
from  incessant  study  from  that  day  to  this. 

Academicism 

Handicapped  people  sometimes  owe  their  success  to  the 
misfortune  which  weights  them.  They  seldom  know  before- 
hand how  far  they  are  going  to  reach,  and  this  helps  them ; 
for  if  they  knew  the  greatness  of  the  task  before  them  they 
would  not  attempt  it.  He  who  knows  he  is  infirm,  and  would 
yet  climb,  does  not  think  of  the  summit  which  he  believes 
to  be  beyond  his  reach  but  climbs  slowly  onwards,  taking 
very  short  steps,  looking  below  as  often  as  he  likes  but  not 
above  him,  never  trying  his  powers  but  seldom  stopping, 
and  then,  sometimes,  behold !  he  is  on  the  top,  which  he 
would  never  have  even  aimed  at  could  he  have  seen  it  from 
below.  It  is  only  in  novels  and  sensational  biographies  that 
handicapped  people,  "fired  by  a  knowledge  of  the  difficulties 
that  others  have  overcome,  resolve  to  triumph  over  every 
obstacle  by  dint  of  sheer  determination,  and  in  the  end  carry 
everything  before  them."  In  real  life  the  person  who  starts 
thus  almost  invariably  fails.  This  is  the  worst  kind  of  start. 

The  greatest  secret  of  good  work  whether  in  music,  litera- 
ture or  painting  lies  in  not  attempting  too  much  ;  if  it  be  asked, 
"What  is  too  much?"  the  answer  is,  "Anything  that  we 
find  difficult  or  unpleasant."  We  should  not  ask  whether 
others  find  this  same  thing  difficult  or  no.  If  we  find  the 
difficulty  so  great  that  the  overcoming  it  is  a  labour  and  not 
a  pleasure,  we  should  either  change  our  aim  altogether,  or 
aim,  at  any  rate  for  a  time,  at  some  lower  point.  It  must  be 


104         On  the  Making  of  Music, 

remembered  that  no  work  is  required  to  be  more  than  right 
as  far  as  it  goes;  the  greatest  work  cannot  get  beyond  this 
and  the  least  comes  strangely  near  the  greatest  if  this  can  be 
said  of  it. 

The  more  I  see  of  academicism  the  more  I  distrust  it.  If 
I  had  approached  painting  as  I  have  approached  bookwriting 
and  music,  that  is  to  say  by  beginning  at  once  to  do  what  I 
wanted,  or  as  near  as  I  could  to  what  I  could  find  out  of  this, 
and  taking  pains  not  by  way  of  solving  academic  difficulties, 
in  order  to  provide  against  practical  ones,  but  by  waiting  till 
a  difficulty  arose  in  practice  and  then  tackling  it,  thus  making 
the  arising  of  each  difficulty  be  the  occasion  for  learning  what 
had  to  be  learnt  about  it — if  I  had  approached  painting  in 
this  way  I  should  have  been  all  right.  As  it  is  I  have  been 
all  wrong,  and  it  was  South  Kensington  and  Heatherley's 
that  set  me  wrong.  I  listened  to  the  nonsense  about  how  I 
ought  to  study  before  beginning  to  paint,  and  about  never 
painting  without  nature,  and  the  result  was  that  I  learned 
to  study  but  not  to  paint.  Now  I  have  got  too  much  to  do 
and  am  too  old  to  do  what  I  might  easily  have  done,  and 
should  have  done,  if  I  had  found  out  earlier  what  writing 
Life  and  Habit  was  the  chief  thing  to  teach  me. 

So  I  painted  study  after  study,  as  a  priest  reads  his 
breviary,  and  at  the  end  of  ten  years  knew  no  more  what  the 
face  of  nature  was  like,  unless  I  had  it  immediately  before 
me,  than  I  did  at  the  beginning.  I  am  free  to  confess  that  in 
respect  of  painting  I  am  a  failure.  I  have  spent  far  more 
time  on  painting  than  I  have  on  anything  else,  and  have 
failed  at  it  more  than  I  have  failed  in  any  other  respect 
almost  solely  for  the  reasons  given  above.  I  tried  very  hard, 
but  I  tried  the  wrong  way. 

Fortunately  for  me  there  are  no  academies  for  teaching 
people  how  to  write  books,  or  I  should  have  fallen  into  them 
as  I  did  into  those  for  painting  and,  instead  of  writing,  should 
have  spent  my  time  and  money  in  being  told  that  I  was 
learning  how  to  write.  If  I  had  one  thing  to  say  to  students 
before  I  died  (I  mean,  if  I  had  got  to  die,  but  might  tell 
students  one  thing  first)  I  should  say : — 

"Don't  learn  to  do,  but  learn  in  doing.  Let  your  falls  not 
be  on  a  prepared  ground,  but  let  them  be  bona  fide  falls  in 
the  rough  and  tumble  of  the  world ;  only,  of  course,  let  them 


Pictures  and  Books  105 

be  on  a  small  scale  in  the  first  instance  till  you  feel  your  feet 
safe  under  you.    Act  more  and  rehearse  less." 

A  friend  once  asked  me  whether  I  liked  writing  books, 
composing  music  or  painting  pictures  best.  I  said  I  did  not 
know.  I  like  them  all;  but  I  never  find  time  to  paint  a 
picture  now  and  only  do  small  sketches  and  studies.  I  know 
in  which  I  am  strongest — writing;  I  know  in  which  I  am 
weakest — painting;  I  am  weakest  where  I  have  taken  most 
pains  and  studied  most. 

Agonising 

In  art,  never  try  to  find  out  anything,  or  try  to  learn 
anything  until  the  not  knowing  it  has  come  to  be  a  nuisance 
to  you  for  some  time.  Then  you  will  remember  it,  but  not 
otherwise.  Let  knowledge  importune  you  before  you  will 
hear  it.  Our  schools  and  universities  go  on  the  precisely 
opposite  system. 

Never  consciously  agonise;  the  race  is  not  to  the  swift, 
nor  the  battle  to  the  strong.  Moments  of  extreme  issue  are 
unconscious  and  must  be  left  to  take  care  of  themselves. 
During  conscious  moments  take  reasonable  pains  but  no  more 
and,  above  all,  work  so  slowly  as  never  to  get  out  of  breath. 
Take  it  easy,  in  fact,  until  forced  not  to  do  so. 

There  is  no  mystery  about  art.  Do  the  things  that  you 
can  see ;  they  will  show  you  those  that  you  cannot  see.  By 
doing  what  you  can  you  will  gradually  get  to  know  what  it  is 
that  you  want  to  do  and  cannot  do,  and  so  to  be  able  to  do  it. 

The  Choice  of  Subjects 

Do  not  hunt  for  subjects,  let  them  choose  you,  not  you 
them.  Only  do  that  which  insists  upon  being  done  and  runs 
right  up  against  you,  hitting  you  in  the  eye  until  you  do  it. 
This  calls  you  and  you  had  better  attend  to  it,  and  do  it  as 
well  as  you  can.  But  till  called  in  this  way  do  nothing. 

Imaginary  Countries 

Each  man's  mind  is  an  unknown  land  to  himself,  so  that 
we  need  not  be  at  such  pains  to  frame  a  mechanism  of  ad- 
venture for  getting  to  undiscovered  countries.  We  have  not 


106         On  the  Making  of  Music, 

far  to  go  before  we  reach  them.    They  are,  like  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven,  within  us. 

My  Books 

I  never  make  them :  they  grow ;  they  come  to  me  and 
insist  on  being  written,  and  on  being  such  and  such.  I  did  not 
want  to  write  Erewhon,  I  wanted  to  go  on  painting  and  found 
it  an  abominable  nuisance  being  dragged  willy-nilly  into 
writing  it.  So  with  all  my  books — the  subjects  were  never 
of  my  own  choosing;  they  pressed  themselves  upon  me  with 
more  force  than  I  could  resist.  If  I  had  not  liked  the 
subjects  I  should  have  kicked,  and  nothing  would  have  got 
me  to  do  them  at  all.  As  I  did  like  the  subjects  and  the 
books  came  and  said  they  were  to  be  written,  I  grumbled  a 
little  and  wrote  them.* 

Great  Works 

These  have  always  something  of  the  "de  profundis"  about 
them. 

New  Ideas 

Every  new  idea  has  something  of  the  pain  and  peril  of 
childbirth  about  it;  ideas  are  just  as  mortal  and  just  as 
immortal  as  organised  beings  are. 

Books  and  Children 

If  the  literary  offspring  is  not  to  die  young,  almost  as  much 
trouble  must  be  taken  with  it  as  with  the  bringing  up  of  a 
physical  child.  Still,  the  physical  child  is  the  harder  work  of 
the  two. 

The  Life  of  Books 

Some  writers  think  about  the  life  of  books  as  some  savages 
think  about  the  life  of  men — that  there  are  books  which  never 
die.  They  all  die  sooner  or  later;  but  that  will  not  hinder 
an  author  from  trying  to  give  his  book  as  long  a  life  as  he  can 
get  for  it.  The  fact  that  it  will  have  to  die  is  no  valid  reason 
for  letting  it  die  sooner  than  can  be  helped. 

*  Cf .  the  note  "Reproduction,"  p.  16  ante. 


Pictures  and  Books  107 

Criticism 

Critics  generally  come  to  be  critics  by  reason  not  of  their 
fitness  for  this  but  of  their  unfitness  for  anything  else.  Books 
should  be  tried  by  a  judge  and  jury  as  though  they  were 
crimes,  and  counsel  should  be  heard  on  both  sides. 

Le  Style  c'est  1'Homme 

It  is  with  books,  music,  painting  and  all  the  arts  as  with 
children — only  those  live  that  have  drained  much  of  their 
author's  own  life  into  them.  The  personality  of  the  author  is 
what  interests  us  more  than  his  work.  When  we  have  once 
got  well  hold  of  the  personality  of  the  author  we  care  com- 
paratively little  about  the  history  of  the  work  or  what  it 
means  or  even  its  technique;  we  enjoy  the  work  without 
thinking  of  more  than  its  beauty,  and  of  how  much  we  like 
the  workman.  "Le  style  c'est  rhomme" — that  style  of  which, 
if  I  may  quote  from  memory,  Buffon,  again,  says  that  it 
is  like  happiness,  and  "vient  de  la  douceur  de  1'ame"  * — 
and  we  care  more  about  knowing  what  kind  of  person  a 
man  was  than  about  knowing  of  his  achievements,  no  matter 
how  considerable  they  may  have  been.  If  he  has  made  it 
clear  that  he  was  trying  to  do  what  we  like,  and  meant  what 
we  should  like  him  to  have  meant,  it  is  enough ;  but  if  the 
work  does  not  attract  us  to  the  workman,  neither  does  it 
attract  us  to  itself. 

Portraits 

A  great  portrait  is  always  more  a  portrait  of  the  painter 
than  of  the  painted.  When  we  look  at  a  portrait  by  Holbein 
or  Rembrandt  it  is  of  Holbein  or  Rembrandt  that  we  think 
more  than  of  the  subject  of  their  picture.  Even  a  portrait 
of  Shakespeare  by  Holbein  or  Rembrandt  could  tell  us  very 
little  about  Shakespeare.  It  would,  however,  tell  us  a  great 
deal  about  Holbein  or  Rembrandt. 

A  Man's  Style 

A  man's  style  in  any  art  should  be  like  his  dress — it  should 
attract  as  little  attention  as  possible. 

*  Evolution  Old  &•  New,  p.  77 


io8         On  the  Making  of  Music, 


The  Gauntlet  of  Youth 

Everything  that  is  to  age  well  must  have  run  the  gauntlet 
of  its  youth.  Hardly  ever  does  a  work  of  art  hold  its  own 
against  time  if  it  was  not  treated  somewhat  savagely  at  first 
—I  should  say  "artist"  rather  than  "work  of  art." 

Greatness  in  Art 

If  a  work  of  art — music,  literature  or  painting — is  for  all 
time,  it  must  be  independent  of  the  conventions,  dialects, 
costumes  and  fashions  of  any  time;  if  not  great  without 
help  from  such  unessential  accessories,  no  help  from  them 
can  greaten  it.  A  man  must  wear  the  dress  of  his  own  time, 
but  no  dressing  can  make  a  strong  man  of  a  weak  one. 

Literary  Power 

They  say  the  test  of  this  is  whether  a  man  can  write  an 
inscription.  I  say  "Can  he  name  a  kitten?"  And  by  this 
test  I  am  condemned,  for  I  cannot. 

Subject  and  Treatment 

It  is  often  said  that  treatment  is  more  important  than 
subject,  but  no  treatment  can  make  a  repulsive  subject  not 
repulsive.  It  can  make  a  trivial,  or  even  a  stupid,  subject 
interesting,  but  a  really  bad  flaw  in  a  subject  cannot  be 
treated  out.  Happily  the  man  who  has  sense  enough  to 
treat  a  subject  well  will  generally  have  sense  enough  to  choose 
a  good  one,  so  that  the  case  of  a  really  repulsive  subject 
treated  in  a  masterly  manner  does  not  often  arise.  It  is 
often  said  to  have  arisen,  but  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  the 
treatment  will  be  found  to  have  been  overpraised. 

Public  Opinion 

People  say  how  strong  it  is ;  and  indeed  it  is  strong  while  it 
is  in  its  prime.  In  its  childhood  and  old  age  it  is  as  weak  as 
any  other  organism.  I  try  to  make  my  own  work  belong  to 
the  youth  of  a  public  opinion.  The  history  of  the  world  is 


Pictures  and  Books  109 

the  record  of  the  weakness,  frailty  and  death  of  public  opin- 
ion, as  geology  is  the  record  of  the  decay  of  those  bodily  or- 
ganisms in  which  opinions  have  found  material  expression. 

A  Literary  Man's  Test 

Moliere's  reading  to  his  housemaid  has,  I  think,  been  mis- 
understood as  though  he  in  some  way  wanted  to  see  the  effect 
upon  the  housemaid  and  make  her  a  judge  of  his  work.  If 
she  was  an  unusually  clever,  smart  girl,  this  might  be  well 
enough,  but  the  supposition  commonly  is  that  she  was  a 
typical  housemaid  and  nothing  more. 

If  Moliere  ever  did  read  to  her,  it  was  because  the  mere 
act  of  reading  aloud  put  his  work  before  him  in  a  new  light 
and,  by  constraining  his  attention  to  every  line,  made  him 
judge  it  more  rigorously.  I  always  intend  to  read,  and 
generally  do  read,  what  I  write  aloud  to  some  one;  any  one 
almost  will  do,  but  he  should  not  be  so  clever  that  I  am  afraid 
of  him.  I  feel  weak  places  at  once  when  I  read  aloud  where 
I  thought,  as  long  as  I  read  to  myself  only,  that  the  passage 
was  all  right. 

What  Audience  to  Write  for 

People  between  the  ages  of  twenty  and  thirty  read  a  good 
deal,  after  thirty  their  reading  drops  off  and  by  forty  is 
confined  to  each  person's  special  subject,  newspapers  and 
magazines ;  so  that  the  most  important  part  of  one's  audience, 
and  that  which  should  be  mainly  written  for,  consists  of 
specialists  and  people  between  twenty  and  thirty. 

Writing  for  a  Hundred  Years  Hence 

When  a  man  is  in  doubt  about  this  or  that  in  his  writing, 
it  will  often  guide  him  if  he  asks  himself  how  it  will  tell  a 
hundred  years  hence. 


VIII 
Handel  and  Music 

Handel  and  Beethoven 

As  a  boy,  from  12  years  old  or  so,  I  always  worshipped 
Handel.  Beethoven  was  a  terra  incognita  to  me  till  I  went 
up  to  Cambridge;  I  knew  and  liked  a  few  of  his  waltzes 
but  did  not  so  much  as  know  that  he  had  written  any  sonatas 
or  symphonies.  At  Cambridge  Sykes  tried  to  teach  me 
Beethoven  but  I  disliked  his  music  and  would  go  away  as 
soon  as  Sykes  began  with  any  of  his  sonatas.  After  a  long 
while  I  began  to  like  some  of  the  slow  movements  and  then 
some  entire  sonatas,  several  of  which  I  could  play  once 
fairly  well  without  notes.  I  used  also  to  play  Bach  and 
Mendelssohn's  Songs  without  Words  and  thought  them 
lovely,  but  I  always  liked  Handel  best.  Little  by  little,  how- 
ever, I  was  talked  over  into  placing  Bach  and  Beethoven  on  a 
par  as  the  greatest  and  I  said  I  did  not  know  which  was  the 
best  man.  I  cannot  tell  now  whether  I  really  liked  Beethoven 
or  found  myself  carried  away  by  the  strength  of  the  Beethoven 
current  which  surrounded  me;  at  any  rate  I  spent  a  great 
deal  of  time  on  him,  for  some  ten  or  a  dozen  years. 

One  night,  when  I  was  about  30,  I  was  at  an  evening  party 
at  Mrs.  Longden's  and  met  an  old  West  End  clergyman  of 
the  name  of  Smalley  (Rector,  I  think,  of  Bayswater).  I 
said  I  did  not  know  which  was  greatest  Handel,  Bach  or 
Beethoven. 

He  said:  "I  am  surprised  at  that;  I  should  have  thought 
you  would  have  known." 

"Which,"  said  I,  "is  the  greatest?" 

"Handel." 

I  knew  he  was  right  and  have  never  wavered  since.  I 

no 


Handel  and  Music  m 

suppose  I  was  really  of  this  opinion  already,  but  it  was  not 
till  I  got  a  little  touch  from  outside  that  I  knew  it.  From 
that  moment  Beethoven  began  to  go  back,  and  now  I  feel 
towards  him  much  as  I  did  when  I  first  heard  his  work, 
except,  of  course,  that  I  see  a  gnosis  in  him  of  which  as  a 
young  man  I  knew  nothing.  But  I  do  not  greatly  care  about 
gnosis,  I  want  agape;  and  Beethoven's  agape  is  not  the 
healthy  robust  tenderness  of  Handel,  it  is  a  sickly  maudlin 
thing  in  comparison.  Anyhow  I  do  not  like  him.  I  like 
Mozart  and  Haydn  better,  .but  not  so  much  better  as  I  should 
like  to  like  them. 

Handel  and  Domenico  Scarlatti 

Handel  and  Domenico  Scarlatti  were  contemporaries 
almost  to  a  year,  both  as  regards  birth  and  death.  They 
knew  each  other  very  well  in  Italy  and  Scarlatti  never  men- 
tioned Handel's  name  without  crossing  himself,  but  I  have 
not  heard  that  Handel  crossed  himself  at  the  mention  of 
Scarlatti's  name.  I  know  very  little  of  Scarlatti's  music  and 
have  not  even  that  little  well  enough  in  my  head  to  write 
about  it;  I  retain  only  a  residuary  impression  that  it  is 
often  very  charming  and  links  Haydn  with  Bach,  moreover 
that  it  is  distinctly  un-Handelian. 

Handel  must  have  known  and  comprehended  Scarlatti's 
tendencies  perfectly  well:  his  rejection,  therefore,  of  the 
principles  that  lead  to  them  must  have  been  deliberate.  Scar- 
latti leads  to  Haydn,  Haydn  to  Mozart  and  hence,  through 
Beethoven,  to  modern  music.  That  Handel  foresaw  this 
I  do  not  doubt,  nor  yet  that  he  felt,  as  I  do  myself,  that 
modern  music  means  something,  I  know  not  what,  which 
is  not  what  I  mean  by  music.  It  is  playing  another  game 
and  has  set  itself  aims  which,  no  doubt,  are  excellent  but 
which  are  not  mine. 

Of  course  I  know  that  this  may  be  all  wrong :  I  know  how 
very  limited  and  superficial  my  own  acquaintance  with  music 
is.  Still  I  have  a  strong  feeling  as  though  from  John  Dun- 
stable,  or  whoever  it  may  have  been,  to  Handel  the  tide  of 
music  was  rising,  intermittently  no  doubt  but  still  rising,  and 
that  since  Handel's  time  it  has  been  falling.  Or,  rather  per- 
haps I  should  say  that  music  bifurcated  with  Handel  and  Bach 


ii2  Handel  and  Music 

— Handel  dying  musically  as  well  as  physically  childless,  while 
Bach  was  as  prolific  in  respect  of  musical  disciples  as  he  was 
in  that  of  children. 

What,  then,  was  it,  supposing  I  am  right  at  all,  that  Handel 
distrusted  in  the  principles  of  Scarlatti  as  deduced  from 
those  of  Bach?  I  imagine  that  he  distrusted  chiefly  the 
abuse  of  the  appoggiatura,  the  abuse  of  the  unlimited  power 
of  modulation  which  equal  temperament  placed  at  the  musi- 
cian's disposition  and  departure  from  well-marked  rhythm, 
beat  or  measured  tread.  At  any  rate  I  believe  the  music 
I  like  best  myself  to  be  sparing  of  the  appoggiatura,  to  keep 
pretty  close  to  tonic  and  dominant  and  to  have  a  well-marked 
beat,  measure  and  rhythm. 

Handel  and  Homer 

Handel  was  a  greater  man  than  Homer  (I  mean  the  author 
of  the  Iliad)  ;  but  the  very  people  who  are  most  angry  with 
me  for  (as  they  incorrectly  suppose)  sneering  at  Homer  are 
generally  the  ones  who  never  miss  an  opportunity  of  cheapen- 
ing and  belittling  Handel,  and,  which  is  very  painful  to 
myself,  they  say  I  was  laughing  at  him  in  Narcissus.  Per- 
haps— but  surely  one  can  laugh  at  a  person  and  adore  him  at 
the  same  time. 

Handel  and  Bach 


If  you  tie  Handel's  hands  by  debarring  him  from  the 
rendering  of  human  emotion,  and  if  you  set  Bach's  free  by 
giving  him  no  human  emotion  to  render — if,  in  fact,  you 
rob  Handel  of  his  opportunities  and  Bach  of  his  difficulties — 
the  two  men  can  fight  after  a  fashion,  but  Handel  will  even 
so  come  off  victorious.  Otherwise  it  is  absurd  to  let  Bach 
compete  at  all.  Nevertheless  the  cultured  vulgar  have  at  all 
times  preferred  gymnastics  and  display  to  reticence  and  the 
healthy,  graceful,  normal  movements  of  a  man  of  birth  and 
education,  and  Bach  is  esteemed  a  more  profound  musician 
than  Handel  in  virtue  of  his  frequent  and  more  involved 
complexity  of  construction.  In  reality  Handel  was  profound 
enough  to  eschew  such  wildernesses  of  counterpoint  as  Bach 
instinctively  resorted  to,  but  he  knew  also  that  public  opinion 


Handel  and  Music  113 

would  be  sure  to  place  Bach  on  a  level  with  himself,  if  not 
above  him,  and  this  probably  made  him  look  askance  at 
Bach.  At  any  rate  he  twice  went  to  Germany  without  being 
at  any  pains  to  meet  him,  and  once,  if  not  twice,  refused 
Bach's  invitation. 

ii 

Rockstro  says  that  Handel  keeps  much  more  closely  to 
the  old  Palestrina  rules  of  counterpoint  than  Bach  does,  and 
that  when  Handel  takes  a  licence  it  is  a  good  bold  one  taken 
rarely,  whereas  Bach  is  niggling  away  with  small  licences 
from  first  to  last. 

Handel  and  the  British  Public 

People  say  the  generous  British  public  supported  Handel. 
It  did  nothing  of  the  kind.  On  the  contrary,  for  some  30 
years  it  did  its  best  to  ruin  him,  twice  drove  him  to  bank- 
ruptcy, badgered  him  till  in  1737  he  had  a  paralytic  seizure 
which  was  as  near  as  might  be  the  death  of  him  and,  if  he 
had  died  then,  we  should  have  no  Israel,  nor  Messiah,  nor 
Samson,  nor  any  of  his  greatest  oratorios.  The  British  public 
only  relented  when  he  had  become  old  and  presently  blind. 
Handel,  by  the  way,  is  a  rare  instance  of  a  man  doing  his 
greatest  work  subsequently  to  an  attack  of  paralysis.  What 
kept  Handel  up  was  not  the  public  but  the  court.  It  was 
the  pensions  given  him  by  George  I  and  George  II  that 
enabled  him  to  carry  on  at  all.  So  that,  in  point  of  fact, 
it  is  to  these  two  very  prosaic  kings  that  we  owe  the  finest 
musical  poems  the  world  knows  anything  about. 

Handel  and  Madame  Patey 

Rockstro  told  me  that  Sir  Michael  Costa,  after  his  severe 
paralytic  stroke,  had  to  conduct  at  some  great  performance — 
I  cannot  be  sure,  but  I  think  he  said  a  Birmingham  Festival 
— at  any  rate  he  came  in  looking  very  white  and  feeble  and 
sat  down  in  front  of  the  orchestra  to  conduct  a  morning 
rehearsal.  Madame  Patey  was  there,  went  up  to  the  poor 
old  genteman  and  kissed  his  forehead. 

It  is  a  curious  thing  about  this  great  singer  that  not  only 
should  she  have  been  (as  she  has  always  seemed  to  me) 


ii4  Handel  and  Music 

strikingly  like  Handel  in  the  face,  and  not  only  should  she 
have  been  such  an  incomparable  renderer  of  Handel's  music 
— I  cannot  think  that  I  shall  ever  again  hear  any  one  who 
seemed  to  have  the  spirit  of  Handel's  music  so  thoroughly 
penetrating  his  or  her  whole  being — but  that  she  should  have 
been  struck  with  paralysis  at,  so  far  as  I  can  remember,  the 
same  age  that  Handel  was.  Handel  was  struck  in  1737  when 
he  was  53  years  old,  but  happily  recovered.  I  forget  Madame 
Patey's  exact  age,  but  it  was  somewhere  about  this. 

Handel  and  Shakespeare 

Jones  and  I  had  been  listening  to  Gaetano  Meo's  girls 
playing  Handel  and  were  talking  about  him  and  Shakespeare, 
and  how  those  two  men  can  alike  stir  us  more  than  any  one 
else  can.  Neither  were  self-conscious  in  production,  but 
when  the  thing  had  come  out  Shakespeare  looks  at  it  and 
wonders,  whereas  Handel  takes  it  as  a  matter  of  course. 


A  Yankee  Handelian 

I  only  ever  met  one  American  who  seemed  to  like  and 
understand  Handel.  How  far  he  did  so  in  reality  I  do  not 
know,  but  inter  alia  he  said  that  Handel  "struck  ile  with 
the  Messiah/'  and  that  "it  panned  out  well,  the  Messiah 
did." 

Waste 

Handel  and  Shakespeare  have  left  us  the  best  that  any 
have  left  us;  yet,  in  spite  of  this,  how  much  of  their  lives 
was  wasted.  Fancy  Handel  expending  himself  upon  the 
Moabites  and  Ammonites,  or  even  the  Jews  themselves,  year 
after  year,  as  he  did  in  the  fulness  of  his  power;  and  fancy 
what  we  might  have  had  from  Shakespeare  if  he  had  gos- 
siped to  us  about  himself  and  his  times  and  the  people 
he  met  in  London  and  at  Stratford-on-Avon  instead  of  writ- 
ing some  of  what  he  did  write.  Nevertheless  we  have  the 
men,  seen  through  their  work  notwithstanding  their  subjects, 
who  stand  and  live  to  us.  It  is  the  figure  of  Handel  as  a  man, 
and  of  Shakespeare  as  a  man,  which  we  value  even  more  than 


Handel  and  Music 

their  work.    I  feel  the  presence  of  Handel  behind  every  note 
of  his  music. 

Handel  a  Conservative 

He  left  no  school  because  he  was  a  protest.  There  were 
men  in  his  time,  whose  music  he  perfectly  well  knew,  who  are 
far  more  modern  than  Handel.  He  was  opposed  to  the 
musically  radical  tendencies  of  his  age  and,  as  a  musician, 
was  a  decided  conservative  in  all  essential  respects — though 
ready,  of  course,  to  go  any  length  in  any  direction  if  he  had 
a  fancy  at  the  moment  for  doing  so. 

Handel  and  Ernest  Pontifex 

It  cost  me  a  great  deal  to  make  Ernest  [in  The  Way  of  All 
Flesh]  play  Beethoven  and  Mendelssohn;  I  did  it  simply 
ad  captandum.  As  a  matter  of  fact  he  played  only  the  music 
of  Handel  and  of  the  early  Italian  and  old  English  composers 
— but  Handel  most  of  all. 


Handel's  Commonplaces 

It  takes  as  great  a  composer  as  Handel — or  rather  it 
would  take  as  great  a  composer  if  he  could  be  found — to  be 
able  to  be  as  easily  and  triumphantly  commonplace  as  Handel 
often  is,  just  as  it  takes — or  rather  would  take — as  great  a 
composer  as  Handel  to  write  another  Hallelujah  chorus.  It 
is  only  the  man  who  can  do  the*  latter  who  can  do  the  former 
as  Handel  has  done  it.  Handel  is  so  great  and  so  simple 
that  no  one  but  a  professional  musician  is  unable  to  under- 
stand him. 

Handel  and  Dr.  Morell 

After  all,  Dr.  Morell  suited  Handel  exactly  well — far  bet- 
ter than  Tennyson  would  have  done.  I  don't  believe  even 
Handel  could  have  set  Tennyson  to  music  comfortably.  What 
a  mercy  it  is  that  he  did  not  live  in  Handel's  time !  Even 
though  Handel  had  set  him  ever  so  well  he  would  have 
spoiled  the  music,  and  this  Dr.  Morell  does  not  in  the  least 
do. 


ii6  Handel  and  Music 


Wordsworth 

And  I  have  been  as  far  as  Hull  to  see 
What  clothes  he  left  or  other  property. 

I  am  told  that  these  lines  occur  in  a  poem  by  Wordsworth. 
(Think  of  the  expense!)  How  thankful  we  ought  to  be 
that  Wordsworth  was  only  a  poet  and  not  a  musician.  Fancy 
a  symphony  by  Wordsworth!  Fancy  having  to  sit  it  out! 
And  fancy  what  it  would  have  been  if  he  had  written  fugues ! 

Sleeping  Beauties 

There  are  plenty  of  them.  Take  Handel ;  look  at  such  an 
air  as  "Loathsome  urns,  disclose  your  treasure"  or  "Come, 
O  Time,  and  thy  broad  wings  displaying,"  both  in  The 
Triunip  of  Time  and  Truth,  or  at  "Convey  me  to  some  peace- 
ful shore,"  in  Alexander  Bolus,  especially  when  he  comes  to 
"Forgetting  and  forgot  the  will  of  fate."  Who  know  these? 
And  yet,  can  human  genius  do  more  ? 

"And  the  Glory  of  the  Lord" 

It  would  be  hard  to  find  a  more  satisfactory  chorus  even 
in  the  Messiah,  but  I  do  not  think  the  music  was  originally 
intended  for  these  words : 


And      the     glo  -  ry,         the        glo    •    ry         ot     the.    Lord. 

If  Handel  had  approached  these  words  without  having  in 
his  head  a  subject  the  spirit  of  which  would  do,  and  which  he 
thought  the  words  with  a  little  management  might  be  made 
to  fit,  he  would  not,  I  think,  have  repeated  "the  glory"  at 
all,  or  at  any  rate  not  here.  If  these  words  had  been  meas- 
ured, as  it  were,  for  a  new  suit  instead  of  being,  as  I  suppose, 
furnished  with  a  good  second-hand  one,  the  word  "the" 
would  not  have  been  tacked  on  to  the  "glory"  which  pre- 
cedes it  and  made  to  belong  to  it  rather  than  to  the  "glory" 
which  follows.  It  does  not  matter  one  straw,  and  if  Handel 
had  asked  me  whether  I  minded  his  forcing  the  words  a  little, 


Handel  and  Music 


117 


I  should  have  said,  "Certainly  not,  nor  more  than  a  little,  if 
you  like."  Nevertheless  I  think  as  a  matter  of  fact  that 
there  is  a  little  forcing.  I  remember  that  as  a  boy  this  always 
struck  me  as  a  strange  arrangement  of  the  words,  but  it  was 
not  until  I  came  to  write  a  chorus  myself  that  I  saw  how  it 
came  about.  I  do  not  suspect  any  forcing  when  it  conies  to 
"And  all  flesh  shall  see  it  together." 

Handel  and  the  Speaking  Voice 

First  Tenor 


While  now  with  -  out        mea  -      *    tore   we       r«    •    •    •    vel    in    plea-sure. 


^ 


J^Jl  **» 


j. 


n8  Handel  and  Music 

The  former  of  these  two  extracts  is  from  the  chorus 
"Venus  laughing  from  the  skies"  in  Theodora;  the  other  is 
from  the  air  "Wise  men  flattering"  in  Judas  Maccab&us. 
I  know  no  better  examples  of  the  way  Handel  sometimes 
derives  his  melody  from  the  natural  intonation  of  the  speak- 
ing voice.  The  "pleasure"  (in  bar  four  of  the  chorus)  sug- 
gests a  man  saying  "with  pleasure"  when  accepting  an  invi- 
tation to  dinner.  Of  course  one  can  say,  "with  pleasure"  in 
a  variety  of  tones,  but  a  sudden  exaltation  on  the  second 
syllable  is  very  common. 

In  the  other  example,  the  first  bar  of  the  accompaniment 
puts  the  argument  in  a  most  persuasive  manner;  the  second 
simply  re-states  it ;  the  third  is  the  clincher,  I  cannot  under- 
stand any  man's  holding  out  against  bar  three.  The  fourth 
bar  re-states  the  clincher,  but  at  a  lower  pitch,  as  by  one  who 
is  quite  satisfied  that  he  has  convinced  his  adversary. 

Handel  and  the  Wetterhorn 

When  last  I  saw  the  Wetterhorn  I  caught  myself  involun- 
tarily humming : — 


.  And  the  government  shall  be  up-on  his  shoul     ••••••«       der. 


The  big  shoulder  of  the  Wetterhorn  seemed  to  fall  just  like 
the  run  on  "shoulder." 

"Tyrants  now  no  more  shall  Dread" 

The  music  to  this  chorus  in  Hercules  is  written  from  the 
tyrant's  point  of  view.  This  is  plain  from  the  jubilant 
defiance  with  which  the  chorus  opens,  and  becomes  still 
plainer  when  the  magnificent  strain  to  which  he  has  set 
the  words  "All  fear  of  punishment,  all  fear  is  o'er"  bursts 
upon  us.  Here  he  flings  aside  all  considerations  save  that 
of  the  gospel  of  doing  whatever  we  please  without  having 
to  pay  for  it.  He  has,  however,  remembered  himself  and 
become  almost  puritanical  over  "The  World's  avenger  is  no 
more."  Here  he  is  quite  proper. 


Handel  and  Music  119 

From  a  dramatic  point  of  view  Handel's  treatment  of 
these  words  must  be  condemned  for  reasons  in  respect  of 
which  Handel  was  very  rarely  at  fault.  It  puzzles  the  listener 
who  expects  the  words  to  be  treated  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  vanquished  slaves  and  not  from  that  of  the  tyrants. 
There  is  no  pretence  that  these  particular  tyrants  are  not 
so  bad  as  ordinary  tyrants,  nor  these  particular  vanquished 
slaves  not  so  good  as  ordinary  vanquished  slaves,  and,  unless 
this  has  been  made  clear  in  some  way,  it  is  dramatically 
de  rigueur  that  the  tyrants  should  come  to  grief,  or  be  about 
to  come  to  grief.  The  hearer  should  know  which  way  his 
sympathies  are  expected  to  go,  and  here  we  have  the  music 
dragging  us  one  way  and  the  words  another. 

Nevertheless,  we  pardon  the  departure  from  the  strict 
rules  of  the  game,  partly  because  of  the  welcome  nature  of 
good  tidings  so  exultantly  announced  to  us  about  all  fear  of 
punishment  being  o'er,  and  partly  because  the  music  is, 
throughout,  so  much  stronger  than  the  words  that  we  lose 
sight  of  them  almost  entirely.  Handel  probably  wrote  as 
he  did  from  a  profound,  though  perhaps  unconscious,  per- 
ception of  the  fact  that  even  in  his  day  there  was  a  great 
deal  of  humanitarian  nonsense  talked  and  that,  after  all, 
the  tyrants  were  generally  quite  as  good  sort  of  people  as 
the  vanquished  slaves.  Having  begun  on  this  tack,  it  was 
easy  to  throw  morality  to  the  winds  when  he  came  to  the 
words  about  all  fear  of  punishment  being  over. 

Handel  and  Marriage 

To  man  God's  universal  law 

Gave  power  to  keep  the  wife  in  awe 

sings  Handel  in  a  comically  dogmatic  little  chorus  in  Samson. 
But  the  universality  of  the  law  must  be  held  to  have  failed  in 
the  case  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  M'Culloch. 

Handel  and  a  Letter  to  a  Solicitor 

Jones  showed  me  a  letter  that  had  been  received  by  the 
solicitor  in  whose  office  he  was  working: 

"Dear  Sir;  I  enclose  the  name  of  the  lawyer  of  the  lady 


I2O 


Handel  and  Music 


I  am  engaged  to  and  her  name  and  address  are  Miss  B. 
Richmond.  His  address  is  W.  W.  Esq.  Manchester. 

"I  remain,  Yours  truly  W.  D.  C." 

I  said  it  reminded  me  of  the  opening  bars  of  "Welcome, 
welcome,  Mighty  King"  in  Saul: 


Carilon 


Handel's  Shower  of  Rain 

The  falling  shower  in  the  air  "As  cheers  the  sun"  in  Joshua 
is,  I  think,  the  finest  description  of  a  warm  sunny  refresh- 
ing rain  that  I  have  ever  come  across  and  one  of  the  most 
wonderfully  descriptive  pieces  of  music  that  even  Handel 
ever  did. 

Theodora  and  Susanna 

In  my  preface  to  Evolution  Old  and  New  I  imply  a  certain 
dissatisfaction  with  Theodora  and  Susanna,  and  imply  also 
that  Handel  himself  was  so  far  dissatisfied  that  in  his  next 
work,  Jephtha  (which  I  see  I  inadvertently  called  his  last), 
he  returned  to  his  earlier  manner.  It  is  true  that  these 
works  are  not  in  Handel's  usual  manner;  they  are  more 
difficult  and  more  in  the  style  of  Bach.  I  am  glad  that 
Handel  gave  us  these  two  examples  of  a  slightly  (for  it 
is  not  much)  varied  manner  and  I  am  interested  to  ob- 
serve that  he  did  not  adhere  to  that  manner  in  Jephtha, 
but  I  should  be  sorry  to  convey  an  impression  that  I  think 
Theodora  and  Susanna  are  in  any  way  unworthy  of  Handel. 
I  prefer  both  to  Judas  Maccabceus  which,  in  spite  of  the 
many  fine  things  it  contains,  I  like  perhaps  the  least  of 
all  his  oratorios.  I  have  played  Theodora  and  Susanna 


Handel  and  Music  121 

all  through,  and  most  parts  (except  the  recitatives)  many 
times  over,  Jones  and  I  have  gone  through  them  again 
and  again ;  I  have  heard  Susanna  performed  once,  and  Theo- 
dora twice,  and  I  find  no  single  piece  in  either  work  which 
I  do  not  admire,  while  many  are  as  good  as  anything  which 
it  is  in  my  power  to  conceive.  I  like  the  chorus  "He  saw 
the  lovely  youth"  the  least  of  anything  in  Theodora  so  far 
as  I  remember  at  this  moment,  but  knowing  it  to  have  been 
a  favourite  with  Handel  himself  I  am  sure  that  I  must  have 
missed  understanding  it. 

How  conies  it,  I  wonder,  that  the  chorale-like  air  "Blessing, 
Honour,  Adoration'"'  is  omitted  in  Novello's  edition?  It  is 
given  in  Clarke's  edition  and  is  very  beautiful. 

Jones  says  of  "With  darkness  deep,"  that  in  the  accom- 
paniment to  this  air  the  monotony  of  dazed  grief  is  just 
varied  now  and  again  with  a  little  writhing  passage.  Whether 
Handel  meant  this  or  no,  the  interpretation  put  upon  the 
passage  fits  the  feeling  of  the  air. 

John  Sebastian  Bach 

It  is  imputed  to  him  for  righteousness  that  he  goes  over 
the  heads  of  the  general  public  and  appeals  mainly  to 
musicians.  But  the  greatest  men  do  not  go  over  the  heads 
of  the  masses,  they  take  them  rather  by  the  hand.  The  true 
musician  would  not  snub  so  much  as  a  musical  critic.  His 
instinct  is  towards  the  man  in  the  street  rather  than  the 
Academy.  Perhaps  I  say  this  as  being  myself  a  man  in  the 
street  musically.  I  do  not  know,  but  I  know  that  Bach  does 
not  appeal  to  me  and  that  I  do  appeal  from  Bach  to  the 
man  in  the  street  and  not  to  the  Academy,  because  I  be- 
lieve the  first  of  these  to  be  the  sounder. 

Still,  I  own  Bach  does  appeal  to  me  sometimes.  In  my 
own  poor  music  I  have  taken  passages  from  him  before  now, 
and  have  my  eye  on  others  which  I  have  no  doubt  will  suit 
me  somewhere.  Whether  Bach  would  know  them  again 
when  I  have  worked  my  will  on  them,  and  much  more 
whether  he  would  own  them,  I  neither  know  nor  care.  I  take 
or  leave  as  I  choose,  and  alter  or  leave  untouched  as  I  choose. 
I  prefer  my  music  to  be  an  outgrowth  from  a  germ  whose 
source  I  know,  rather  than  a  waif  and  stray  which  I  fancy  to 


122 


Handel  and  Music 


be  my  own  child  when  it  was  all  the  time  begotten  of  a  barrel 
organ.  It  is  a  wise  tune  that  knows  its  own  father  and  I  like 
my  music  to  be  the  legitimate  offspring  of  respectable  parents. 
Roughly,  however,  as  I  have  said  over  and  over  again,  if  I 
think  something  that  I  know  and  greatly  like  in  music,  no  mat- 
ter whose,  is  appropriate,  I  appropriate  it.  I  should  say  I  was 
under  most  obligations  to  Handel,  Purcell  and  Beethoven. 
For  example,  any  one  who  looked  at  my  song  "Man  in 
Vain"  in  Ulysses  might  think  it  was  taken  from  "Batti, 
batti."  I  should  like  to  say  it  was  taken  from,  or  suggested 
by,  a  few  bars  in  the  opening  of  Beethoven's  pianoforte 
sonata  op.  78,  and  a  few  bars  in  the  accompaniment  to  the 
duet  "Hark  how  the  Songsters"  in  Purcell's  Timon  of  Athens. 
I  am  not  aware  of  having  borrowed  more  in  the  song  than 
what  follows  as  natural  development  of  these  two  passages 
which  run  thus: 


Beethoven. 


tk 


t  t 


Purcell 


i 


LL^n    i=g 


From  the  pianoforte  arrariKeinent  in  The  Beauties  of  Purcell 
by  John  Clarke,  Mus.  Doc. 


Honesty 

Honesty  consists  not  in  never  stealing  but  in  knowing 
where  to  stop  in  stealing,  and  how  to  make  good  use  of  what 
one  does  steal.  It  is  only  great  proprietors  who  can  steal 
well  and  wisely.  A  good  stealer,  a  good  user  of  what  he  takes, 


Handel  and  Music  123 

is  ipso  facto  a  good  inventor.  Two  men  can  invent  after  a 
fashion  to  one  who  knows  how  to  make  the  best  use  of  what 
has  been  done  already. 


Musical  Criticism 

I  went  to  the  Bach  Choir  concert  and  heard  Mozart's 
Requiem.  I  did  not  rise  warmly  to  it.  Then  I  heard  an 
extract  from  Parsifal  which  I  disliked  very  much.  If  Bach 
wriggles,  Wagner  writhes.  Yet  next  morning  in  the  Times 
I  saw  this  able,  heartless  failure,  compact  of  gnosis  as  much 
as  any  one  pleases  but  without  one  spark  of  either  true  pathos 
or  true  humour,  called  "the  crowning  achievement  of  dra- 
matic music."  The  writer  continues:  "To  the  unintelli- 
gent, music  of  this  order  does  not  appeal" ;  which  only  means 
"I  am  intelligent  and  you  had  better  think  as  I  tell  you." 
I  am  glad  that  such  people  should  call  Handel  a  thieving 
plagiarist. 

On  Borrowing  in  Music 

In  books  it  is  easy  to  make  mention  of  the  forgotten  dead 
to  whom  we  are  indebted,  and  to  acknowledge  an  obligation 
at  the  same  time  and  place  that  we  incur  it.  The  more 
original  a  writer  is,  the  more  pleasure  will  he  take  in  calling 
attention  to  the  forgotten  work  of  those  who  have  gone  be- 
fore him.  The  conventions  of  painting  and  music,  on  the 
other  hand,  while  they  admit  of  borrowing  no  less  freely 
than  literature  does,  do  not  admit  of  acknowledgement ;  it  is 
impossible  to  interrupt  a  piece  of  music,  or  paint  some  words 
upon  a  picture  to  explain  that  the  composer  or  painter 
was  at  such  and  such  a  point  indebted  to  such  and  such  a 
source  for  his  inspiration,  but  it  is  not  less  impossible  to  avoid 
occasionally  borrowing,  or  rather  taking,  for  there  is  no  need 
of  euphemism,  from  earlier  work.  Where,  then,  is  the  line 
to  be  drawn  between  lawful  and  unlawful  adoption  of  what 
has  been  done  by  others?  This  question  is  such  a  nice  one 
that  there  are  almost  as  many  opinions  upon  it  as  there  are 
painters  and  musicians. 

To  leave  painting  on  one  side,  if  a  musician  wants  some 
forgotten  passage  in  an  earlier  writer,  is  he,  knowing  where 


124  Handel  and  Music 

this  sleeping  beauty  lies,  to  let  it  sleep  on  unknown  and 
unen joyed,  or  shall  he  not  rather  wake  it  and  take  it — as 
likely  enough  the  earlier  master  did  before  him — with,  or 
without  modification?  It  may  be  said  this  should  be  done 
by  republishing  the  original  work  with  its  composer's  name, 
giving  him  his  due  laurels.  So  it  should,  if  the  work  will 
bear  it;  but  more  commonly  times  will  have  so  changed 
that  it  will  not.  A  composer  may  want  a  bar,  or  bar  and  a 
half,  out  of,  say,  a  dozen  pages — he  may  not  want  even  this 
much  without  more  or  less  modification — is  he  to  be  told 
that  he  must  republish  the  ten  or  dozen  original  pages  within 
which  the  passage  he  wants  lies  buried,  as  the  only  righteous 
way  of  giving  it  new  life?  No  one  should  be  allowed  such 
dog-in-the-manger-like  ownership  in  beauty  that  because  it 
has  once  been  revealed  to  him  therefore  none  for  ever  after 
shall  enjoy  it  unless  he  be  their  cicerone.  If  this  rule  were 
sanctioned,  he  who  first  produced  anything  beautiful  would 
sign  its  death  warrant  for  an  earlier  or  later  date,  or  at  best 
would  tether  that  which  should  forthwith  begin  putting  gir- 
dles round  the  world. 

Beauty  lives  not  for  the  self-glorification  of  the  priests 
of  any  art,  but  for  the  enjoyment  of  priests  and  laity  alike. 
He  is  the  best  art-priest  who  brings  most  beauty  most  home 
to  the  hearts  of  most  men.  If  any  one  tells  an  artist  that 
part  of  what  he  has  brought  home  is  not  his  but  another's, 
"Yea,  let  him  take  all,"  should  be  his  answer.  He  should 
know  no  self  in  the  matter.  He  is  a  fisher  of  men's  hearts 
from  love  of  winning  them,  and  baits  his  hook  with  what  will 
best  take  them  without  much  heed  where  he  gets  it  from. 
He  can  gain  nothing  by  offering  people  what  they  know  or 
ought  to  know  already;  he  will  not  therefore  take  from  the 
living  or  lately  dead ;  for  the  same  reason  he  will  instinctively 
avoid  anything  with  which  his  hearers  will  be  familiar, 
except  as  recognised  common  form,  but  beyond  these  limits 
he  should  take  freely  even  as  he  hopes  to  be  one  day  taken 
from. 

True,  there  is  a  hidden  mocking  spirit  in  things  which 
ensures  that  he  alone  can  take  well  who  can  also  make  well, 
but  it  is  no  less  true  that  he  alone  makes  well  who  takes  well. 
A  man  must  command  all  the  resources  of  his  art,  and  of 
these  none  is  greater  than  knowledge  of  what  has  been  done 


Handel  and  Music  125 

by  predecessors.  What,  I  wonder,  may  he  take  from  these — 
how  may  he  build  himself  upon  them  and  grow  out  of  them 
— if  he  is  to  make  it  his  chief  business  to  steer  clear  of  them? 
A  safer  canon  is  that  the  development  of  a  musician  should 
be  like  that  of  a  fugue  or  first  movement,  in  which,  the  sub- 
ject having  been  enounced,  it  is  essential  that  thenceforward 
everything  shall  be  both  new  and  old  at  one  and  the  same 
time — new,  but  not  too  new — old,  but  not  too  old. 

Indeed  no  musician  can  be  original  in  respect  of  any  large 
percentage  of  his  work.  For  independently  of  his  turning  to 
his  own  use  the  past  labour  involved  in  musical  notation, 
which  he  makes  his  own  as  of  right  without  more  thanks  to 
those  who  thought  it  out  than  we  give  to  him  who  invented 
wheels  when  we  hire  a  cab,  independently  of  this,  it  is  sur- 
prising how  large  a  part  even  of  the  most  original  music  con- 
sists of  common  form  scale  passages,  and  closes.  Mutatis 
mutandis,  the  same  holds  good  with  even  the  most  original 
book  or  picture ;  these  passages  or  forms  are  as  light  and  air, 
common  to  all  of  us ;  but  the  principle  having  been  once  ad- 
mitted that  some  parts  of  a  man's  work  cannot  be  original — 
not,  that  is  to  say,  if  he  has  descended  with  only  a  reasonable 
amount  of  modification — where  is  the  line  to  be  drawn? 
Where  does  common  form  begin  and  end? 

The  answer  is  that  it  is  not  mere  familiarity  that  should 
forbid  borrowing,  but  familiarity  with  a  passage  as  associated 
with  special  surroundings.  If  certain  musical  progressions 
are  already  associated  with  many  different  sets  of  antecedents 
and  consequents,  they  have  no  special  association,  except  in 
so  far  as  they  may  be  connected  with  a  school  or  epoch ;  no 
one,  therefore,  is  offended  at  finding  them  associated  with 
one  set  the  more.  Familiarity  beyond  a  certain  point  ceases 
to  be  familiarity,  or  at  any  rate  ceases  to  be  open  to  the 
objections  that  lie  against  that  which,  though  familiar,  is 
still  not  familiar  as  common  form.  Those  on  the  other  hand 
who  hold  that  a  musician  should  never  knowingly  borrow 
will  doubtless  say  that  common  form  passages  are  an  obvious 
and  notorious  exception  to  their  rule,  and  the  one  the  limits 
of  which  are  easily  recognised  in  practice  however  hard  it 
may  be  to  define  them  neatly  on  paper. 

It  is  not  suggested  that  when  a  musician  wants  to  compose 
an  air  or  chorus  he  is  to  cast  about  for  some  little-known 


126  Handel  and  Music 

similar  piece  and  lay  it  under  contribution.  This  is  not  to 
spring  from  the  loins  of  living  ancestors  but  to  batten  on 
dead  men's  bones.  He  who  takes  thus  will  ere  long  lose  even 
what  little  power  to  take  he  may  have  ever  had.  On  the 
other  hand  there  is  no  enjoyable  work  in  any  art  which  is 
not  easily  recognised  as  the  affiliated  outcome  of  something 
that  has  gone  before  it.  This  is  more  especially  true  of  music, 
whose  grammar  and  stock  in  trade  are  so  much  simpler  than 
those  of  any  other  art.  He  who  loves  music  will  know  what 
the  best  men  have  done,  and  hence  will  have  numberless 
passages  from  older  writers  floating  at  all  times  in  his  mind, 
like  germs  in  the  air,  ready  to  hook  themselves  on  to  anything 
of  an  associated  character.  Some  of  these  he  will  reject  at 
once,  as  already  too  strongly  wedded  to  associations  of  their 
own ;  some  are  tried  and  found  not  so  suitable  as  was  thought ; 
some  one,  however,  will  probably  soon  assert  itself  as  either 
suitable,  or  easily  altered  so  as  to  become  exactly  what  is 
wanted ;  if,  indeed,  it  is  the  right  passage  in  the  right  man's 
mind,  it  will  have  modified  itself  unbidden  already.  How, 
then,  let  me  ask  again,  is  the  musician  to  comport  himself 
towards  those  uninvited  guests  of  his  thoughts?  Is  he  to 
give  them  shelter,  cherish  them,  and  be  thankful?  or  is  he 
to  shake  them  rudely  off,  bid  them  begone,  and  go  out  of  his 
way  so  as  not  to  fall  in  with  them  again? 

Can  there  be  a  doubt  what  the  answer  to  this  question 
should  be?  As  it  is  fatal  deliberately  to  steer  on  to  the 
work  of  other  composers,  so  it  is  no  less  fatal  deliberately  to 
steer  clear  of  it;  music  to  be  of  any  value  must  be  a  man's 
freest  and  most  instinctive  expression.  Instinct  in  the  case 
of  all  the  greatest  artists,  whatever  their  art  may  be,  bids 
them  attach  themselves  to,  and  grow  out  of  those  predecessors 
who  are  most  congenial  to  them.  Beethoven  grew  out  of 
Mozart  and  Haydn,  adding  a  leaven  which  in  the  end  leavened 
the  whole  lump,  but  in  the  outset  adding  little ;  Mozart  grew 
out  of  Haydn,  in  the  outset  adding  little;  Haydn  grew  out  of 
Domenico  Scarlatti  and  Emmanuel  Bach,  adding,  in  the 
outset,  little.  These  men  grew  out  of  John  Sebastian  Bach, 
for  much  as  both  of  them  admired  Handel  I  cannot  see  that 
they  allowed  his  music  to  influence  theirs.  Handel  even  in 
his  own  lifetime  was  more  or  less  of  a  survival  and  protest; 
he  saw  the  rocks  on  to  which  music  was  drifting  and  steered 


Handel  and  Music  127 

his  own  good  ship  wide  of  them ;  as  for  his  musical  parentage, 
he  grew  out  of  the  early  Italians  and  out  of  Purcell. 

The  more  original  a  composer  is  the  more  certain  is  he  to 
have  made  himself  a  strong  base  of  operations  in  the  works 
of  earlier  men,  striking  his  roots  deep  into  them,  so  that  he, 
as  it  were,  gets  inside  them  and  lives  in  them,  they  in  him, 
and  he  in  them ;  then,  this  firm  foothold  having  been  obtained, 
he  sallies  forth  as  opportunity  directs,  with  the  result  that 
his  works  will  reflect  at  once  the  experiences  of  his  own 
musical  life  and  of  those  musical  progenitors  to  whom  a  lov- 
ing instinct  has  more  particularly  attached  him.  The  fact 
that  his  work  is  deeply  imbued  with  their  ideas  and  little 
ways,  is  not  due  to  his  deliberately  taking  from  them.  He 
makes  their  ways  his  own  as  children  model  themselves  upon 
those  older  persons  who  are  kind  to  them.  He  loves  them 
because  he  feels  they  felt  as  he  does,  and  looked  on  men  and 
things  much  as  he  looks  upon  them  himself;  he  is  an  out- 
growth in  the  same  direction  as  that  in  which  they  grew ;  he 
is  their  son,  bound  by  every  law  of  heredity  to  be  no  less  them 
than  himself ;  the  manner,  therefore,  which  came  most  natu- 
rally to  them  will  be  the  one  which  comes  also  most  naturally 
to  him  as  being  their  descendant.  Nevertheless  no  matter 
how  strong  a  family  likeness  may  be,  (and  it  is  sometimes,  as 
between  Handel  and  his  forerunners,  startlingly  close)  two 
men  of  different  generations  will  never  be  so  much  alike  that 
the  work  of  each  will  not  have  a  character  of  its,  own — unless 
indeed  the  one  is  masquerading  as  the  other,  which  is  not 
tolerable  except  on  rare  occasions  and  on  a  very  small  scale. 
No  matter  how  like  his  father  a  man  may  be  we  can  always 
tell  the  two  apart ;  but  this  once  given,  so  that  he  has  a  clear 
life  of  his  own,  then  a  strong  family  likeness  to  some  one  else 
is  no  more  to  be  regretted  or  concealed  if  it  exists  than  to  be 
affected  if  it  does  not. 

It  is  on  these  terms  alone  that  attractive  music  can  be 
written,  and  it  is  a  musician's  business  to  write  attractive 
music.  He  is,  as  it  were,  tenant  for  life  of  the  estate  of  and 
trustee  for  that  school  to  which  he  belongs.  Normally,  that 
school  will  be  the  one  which  has  obtained  the  firmest  hold 
upon  his  own  countrymen.  An  Englishman  cannot  success- 
fully write  like  a  German  or  a  Hungarian,  nor  is  it  desirable 
that  he  should  try.  If,  by  way  of  variety,  we  want  German 


128  Handel  and  Music 

or  Hungarian  music  we  shall  get  a  more  genuine  article  by 
going  direct  to  German  or  Hungarian  composers.  For  the 
most  part,  however,  the  soundest  Englishmen  will  be  stay- 
at-homes,  in  spite  of  their  being  much  given  to  summer 
flings  upon  the  continent.  Whether  as  writers,  therefore, 
or  as  listeners,  Englishmen  should  stick  chiefly  to  Purcell, 
Handel,  and  Sir  Arthur  Sullivan.  True,  Handel  was  not  an 
Englishman  by  birth,  but  no  one  was  ever  more  thoroughly 
English  in  respect  of  all  the  best  and  most  distinguishing 
features  of  Englishmen.  As  a  young  man,  though  Italy 
and  Germany  were  open  to  him,  he  adopted  the  country  of 
Purcell,  feeling  it,  doubtless,  to  be,  as  far  as  he  was  con- 
cerned, more  Saxon  than  Saxony  itself.  He  chose  England ; 
nor  can  there  be  a  doubt  that  he  chose  it  because  he  be- 
lieved it  to  be  the  country  in  which  his  music  had  the  best 
chance  of  being  appreciated.  And  what  does  this  involve,  if 
not  that  England,  take  it  all  round,  is  the  most  musically 
minded  country  in  the  world?  That  this  is  so,  that  it  has 
produced  the  finest  music  the  world  has  known,  and  is  there- 
fore the  finest  school  of  music  in  the  world,  cannot  be  rea- 
sonably disputed. 

To  the  born  musician,  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  say,  neither 
the  foregoing  remarks  nor  any  others  about  music,  except 
those  that  may  be  found  in  every  text  book,  can  be  of  the 
smallest  use.  Handel  knew  this  and  no  man  ever  said  less 
about  his  art — or  did  more  in  it.  There  are  some  semi- 
apocryphal  *  rules  for  tuning  the  harpsichord  that  pretend, 
with  what  truth  I  know  not,  to  hail  from  him,  but  here  his 
theoretical  contributions  to  music  begin  and  end.  The  rules 
begin  "In  this  chord"  (the  tonic  major  triad)  "tune  the 
fifth  pretty  flat,  and  the  third  considerably  too  sharp." 
There  is  an  absence  of  fuss  about  these  words  which  suggests 
Handel  himself. 

The  written  and  spoken  words  of  great  painters  or  musi- 
cians who  can  talk  or  write  is  seldom  lasting — artists  are  a 
dumb  inarticulate  folk,  whose  speech  is  in  their  hands  not  in 

*  Twelve  Voluntaries  and  Fugues  for  the  Organ  or  Harpsichord 
•with  Rules  for  Tuning.  By  the  celebrated  Mr.  Handel.  Butler  had 
a  copy  of  this  book  and  gave  it  to  the  British  Museum  (Press  Mark, 
e.  1089).  We  showed  the  rules  to  Rockstro,  who  said  they  were  very 
interesting  and  probably  authentic;  they  would  tune  the  instrument 
in  one  of  the  mean  tone  temperaments. 


Handel  and  Music  129 

their  tongues.  They  look  at  us  like  seals,  but  cannot  talk  to 
us.  To  the  musician,  therefore,  what  has  been  said  above  is 
useless,  if  not  worse;  its  object  will  have  been  attained  if  it 
aids  the  uncreative  reader  to  criticise  what  he  hears  with 
more  intelligence. 

Music 

So  far  as  I  can  see,  this  is  the  least  stable  of  the  arts. 
From  the  earliest  records  we  learn  that  there  were  musicians, 
and  people  seem  to  have  been  just  as  fond  of  music  as  we  are 
ourselves,  but,  whereas  we  find  the  old  sculpture,  painting 
(what  there  is  of  it)  and  literature  to  have  been  in  all  essen- 
tials like  our  own,  and  not  only  this  but  whereas  we  find 
them  essentially  the  same  in  existing  nations  in  Europe,  Asia, 
Africa  and  America,  this  is  not  so  as  regards  music  either 
looking  to  antiquity  or  to  the  various  existing  nations.  I 
believe  we  should  find  old  Greek  and  Roman  music  as  hide- 
ous as  we  do  Persian  and  Japanese,  or  as  Persians  and  Japa- 
nese find  our  own. 

I  believe  therefore  that  the  charm  of  music  rests  on  a 
more  unreasoning  basis,  and  is  more  dependent  on  what  we 
are  accustomed  to,  than  the  pleasure  given  by  the  other  arts. 
We  now  find  all  the  ecclesiastical  modes,  except  the  Ionian 
and  the  ^Eolian,  unsatisfactory,  indeed  almost  intolerable, 
but  I  question  whether,  if  we  were  as  much  in  the  habit  of 
using  the  Dorian,  Phrygian,  Lydian  and  Mixo-Lydian  modes 
as  we  are  of  using  the  later  JEo\ian  mode  (the  minor  scale), 
we  should  not  find  these  just  as  satisfactory.  Is  it  not 
possible  that  our  indisputable  preference  for  the  Ionian  mode 
(the  major  scale)  is  simply  the  result  of  its  being  the  one  to 
which  we  are  most  accustomed?  If  another  mode  were  to 
become  habitual,  might  not  this  scale  or  mode  become  first 
a  kind  of  supplementary  moon-like  mode  (as  the  yEolian 
now  is)  and  finally  might  it  not  become  intolerable  to  us? 
Happily  it  will  last  my  time  as  it  is. 

Discords 

Formerly  all  discords  were  prepared,  and  Monteverde's 
innovation  of  taking  the  dominant  seventh  unprepared  was 
held  to  be  cataclysmic,  but  in  modern  music  almost  any 


i3°  Handel  and  Music 

conceivable  discord  may  be  taken  unprepared.  We  have 
grown  so  used  to  this  now  that  we  think  nothing  of  it,  still, 
whenever  it  can  be  done  without  sacrificing  something  more 
important,  I  think  even  a  dominant  seventh  is  better  pre- 
pared. 

It  is  only  the  preparation,  however,  of  discords  which  is 
now  less  rigorously  insisted  on;  their  resolution — generally 
by  the  climbing  down  of  the  offending  note — is  as  necessary 
as  ever  if  the  music  is  to  flow  on  smoothly. 

This  holds  good  exactly  in  our  daily  life.  If  a  discord  has 
to  be  introduced,  it  is  better  to  prepare  it  as  a  concord,  take 
it  on  a  strong  beat,  and  resolve  it  downwards  on  a  weak 
one.  The  preparation  being  often  difficult  or  impossible  may 
be  dispensed  with,  but  the  resolution  is  still  de  rigueur. 

Anachronism 

It  has  been  said  "Thou  shalt  not  masquerade  in  costumes 
not  of  thine  own  period,"  but  the  history  of  art  is  the  history 
of  revivals.  Musical  criticism,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  is  the  least 
intelligent  of  the  criticisms  on  this  score.  Unless  a  man 
writes  in  the  exotic  style  of  Brahms,  Wagner,  Dvorak  and 
I  know  not  what  other  Slav,  Czech,  Teuton  or  Hebrew,  the 
critics  are  sure  to  accuse  him  of  being  an  anachronism.  The 
only  man  in  England  who  is  permitted  to  write  in  a  style 
which  is  in  the  main  of  home  growth  is  the  Irish  Jew,  Sir 
Arthur  Sullivan.  If  we  may  go  to  a  foreign  style  why  may 
we  not  go  to  one  of  an  earlier  period  ?  But  surely  we  may  do 
whatever  we  like,  and  the  better  we  like  it  the  better  we  shall 
do  it.  The  great  thing  is  to  make  sure  that  we  like  the  style 
we  choose  better  than  we  like  any  other,  that  we  engraft 
on  it  whatever  we  hear  that  we  think  will  be  a  good  addition, 
and  depart  from  it  wherever  we  dislike  it.  If  a  man  does 
this  he  may  write  in  the  style  of  the  year  one  and  he  will  be 
no  anachronism;  the  musical  critics  may  call  him  one  but 
they  cannot  make  him  one. 

Chapters  in  Music 

The  analogy  between  literature,  painting  and  music,  so 
close  in  so  many  respects,  suggests  that  the  modern  custom 


Handel  and  Music  13 I 

of  making  a  whole  scene,  act  or  even  drama  into  a  single, 
unbroken  movement  without  subdivision  is  like  making  a 
book  without  chapters,  or  a  picture,  like  Bernardino  Luini's 
great  Lugano  fresco  in  which  a  long  subject  is  treated  within 
the  compass  of  a  single  piece.  Better  advised,  as  it  seems  to 
me,  Gaudenzio  Ferrari  broke  up  a  space  of  the  same  shape 
and  size  at  Varallo  into  many  compartments,  each  more  or 
less  complete  in  itself,  grouped  round  a  central  scene.  The 
subdivision  of  books  into  chapters,  each  with  a  more  or  less 
emphatic  full  close  in  its  own  key,  is  found  to  be  a  help  as 
giving  the  attention  halting  places  by  the  way.  Everything 
that  is  worth  attending  to  fatigues  as  well  as  delights,  much 
as  the  climbing  of  a  mountain  does  so.  Chapters  and  short 
pieces  give  rests  during  which  the  attention  gathers  renewed 
strength  and  attacks  with  fresh  ardour  a  new  stretch  of  the 
ascent.  Each  bar  is,  as  it  were,  a  step  cut  in  ice  and  one  does 
not  see,  if  set  pieces  are  objected  to,  why  phrases  and  bars 
should  not  be  attacked  next. 


At  the  Opera 

Jones  and  I  went  last  Friday  to  Don  Giovanni,  Mr.  Kemp  * 
putting  us  in  free.  It  bored  us  both,  and  we  like  Narcissus 
better.  We  admit  the  beauty  of  many  of  the  beginnings  of 
the  airs,  but  this  beauty  is  not  maintained,  in  every  case  the 
air  tails  off  into  something  that  is  much  too  near  being  tire- 
some. The  plot,  of  course,  is  stupid  to  a  degree,  but  plot  has 
very  little  to  do  with  it;  what  can  be  more  uninteresting 
than  the  plot  of  many  of  Handel's  oratorios?  We  both 
believe  the  scheme  of  Italian  opera  to  be  a  bad  one;  we 
think  that  music  should  never  be  combined  with  acting  to  a 
greater  extent  than  is  done,  we  will  say,  in  the  Mikado; 
that  the  oratorio  form  is  far  more  satisfactory  than  opera ; 
and  we  agreed  that  we  had  neither  of  us  ever  yet  been  to  an 
opera  (I  mean  a  Grand  Opera)  without  being  bored  by  it. 
I  am  not  sorry  to  remember  that  Handel  never  abandoned 
oratorio  after  he  had  once  fairly  taken  to  it. 

*  Mr.  Kemp  lived  in  Barnard's  Inn  on  my  staircase.  He  was  in 
the  box-office  at  Drury  Lane  Theatre.  See  a  further  note  about  him 
on  p.  153  post. 


132  Handel  and  Music 


At  a  Philharmonic  Concert 

We  went  last  night  to  the  Philharmonic  and  sat  in  the 
shilling  orchestra,  just  behind  the  drums,  so  that  we  could 
see  and  hear  what  each  instrument  was  doing.  The  concert 
began  with  Mozart's  G  Minor  Symphony.  We  liked  this 
fairly  well,  especially  the  last  movement,  but  we  found  all  the 
movements  too  long  and,  speaking  for  myself,  if  I  had  a 
tame  orchestra  for  which  I  might  write  programmes,  I  should 
probably  put  it  down  once  or  twice  again,  not  from  any 
spontaneous  wish  to  hear  more  of  it  but  as  a  matter  of  duty 
that  I  might  judge  it  with  fuller  comprehension — still,  if 
each  movement  had  been  half  as  long  I  should  probably  have 
felt  cordially  enough  towards  it,  except  of  course  in  so  far  as 
that  the  spirit  of  the  music  is  alien  to  that  of  the  early  Italian 
school  with  which  alone  I  am  in  genuine  sympathy  and  of 
which  Handel  is  the  climax. 

Then  came  a  terribly  long-winded  recitative  by  Beethoven 
and  an  air  with  a  good  deal  of  "Che  faro"  in  it.  I  do  not 
mind  this,  and  if  it  had  been  "Che  faro"  absolutely  I  should, 
I  daresay,  have  liked  it  better.  I  never  want  to  hear  it  again 
and  my  orchestra  should  never  play  it. 

Beethoven's  Concerto  for  violin  and  orchestra  (op.  61) 
which  followed  was  longer  and  more  tedious  still.  I  have 
not  a  single  good  word  for  it.  If  the  subject  of  the  last  move- 
ment was  the  tune  of  one  of  Arthur  Robert's  comic  songs,  or 
of  any  music-hall  song,  it  would  do  very  nicely  and  I  daresay 
we  should  often  hum  it.  I  do  not  mean  at  the  opening  of  the 
movement  but  about  half  way  through,  where  the  character 
is  just  that  of  a  common  music-hall  song  and,  so  far,  good. 

Part  II  opened  with  a  suite  in  F  Major  for  orchestra  (op. 
39)  by  Moszkowski.  This  was  much  more  clear  and,  in  every 
way,  interesting  than  the  Beethoven ;  every  now  and  then 
there  were  passages  that  were  pleasing,  not  to  say  more. 
Jones  liked  it  better  than  I  did ;  still,  one  could  not  feel  that 
any  of  the  movements  were  the  mere  drivelling  show  stuff  of 
which  the  concerto  had  been  full.  But  it,  like  everything 
else  done  at  these  concerts,  is  too  long,  cut  down  one-half  it 
would  have  been  all  right  and  we  should  have  liked  to  hear 
it  twice.  As  it  was,  all  we  could  say  was  that  it  was  much 


Handel  and  Music  133 

better  than  we  had  expected.  I  did  not  like  the  look  of  the 
young  man  who  wrote  it  and  who  also  conducted.  He  had 
long  yellowish  hair  and  kept  tossing  his  head  to  fling  it  back 
on  to  his  shoulders,  instead  of  keeping  it  short  as  Jones  and  I 
keep  ours. 

Then  came  Schubert's  "Erl  Konig,"  which,  I  daresay,  is 
very  fine  but  with  which  I  have  absolutely  nothing  in  common. 

And  finally  there  was  a  tiresome  characteristic  overture 
by  Berlioz,  which,  if  Jones  could  by  any  possibility  have 
written  anything  so  dreary,  I  should  certainly  have  begged 
him  not  to  publish. 

The  general  impression  left  upon  me  by  the  concert  is  that 
all  the  movements  were  too  long,  and  that,  no  matter  how 
clever  the  development  may  be,  it  spoils  even  the  most  pleas- 
ing and  interesting  subject  if  there  is  too  much  of  it.  Handel 
knew  when  to  stop  and,  when  he  meant  stopping,  he  stopped 
much  as  a  horse  stops,  with  little,  if  any,  peroration.  Who 
can  doubt  that  he  kept  his  movements  short  because  he 
knew  that  the  worst  music  within  a  reasonable  compass  is 
better  than  the  best  which  is  made  tiresome  by  being  spun 
out  unduly?  I  only  know  one  concerted  piece  of  Handel's 
which  I  think  too  long,  I  mean  the  overture  to  Saul,  but  I 
have  no  doubt  that  if  I  were  to  try  to  cut  it  down  I  should 
find  some  excellent  reason  that  had  made  Handel  decide  on 
keeping  it  as  it  is. 

At  the  Wind  Concerts 

There  have  been  some  interesting  wind  concerts  lately; 
I  say  interesting,  because  they  brought  home  to  us  the  un- 
satisfactory character  of  wind  unsupported  by  strings.  I 
rather  pleased  Jones  by  saying  that  the  hautbois  was  the 
clarionet  with  a  cold  in  its  head,  and  the  bassoon  the  same 
with  a  cold  on  its  chest. 

At  a    Handel  Festival 
i 

The  large  sweeps  of  sound  floated  over  the  orchestra  like 
the  wind  playing  upon  a  hill-side  covered  with  young  heather, 
and  I  sat  and  wondered  which  of  the  Alpine  passes  Handel 


134  Handel  and  Music 

crossed  when  he  went  into  Italy.  What  time  of  the  year  was 
it?  What  kind  of  weather  did  he  have?  Were  the  spring 
flowers  out?  Did  he  walk  the  greater  part  of  the  way  as  we 
do  now?  And  what  did  he  hear?  For  he  must  sometimes 
have  heard  music  inside  him — and  that,  too,  as  much  above 
what  he  has  written  down  as  what  he  has  written  down  is 
above  all  other  music.  No  man  can  catch  all,  or  always  the 
best,  of  what  is  put  for  a  moment  or  two  within  his  reach. 
Handel  took  as  much  and  as  near  the  best,  doubtless,  as 
mortal  man  can  take;  but  he  must  have  had  moments  and 
glimpses  which  were  given  to  him  alone  and  which  he  could 
tell  no  man. 

ii 

I  saw  the  world  a  great  orchestra  filled  with  angels  whose 
instruments  were  of  gold.  And  I  saw  the  organ  on  the  top 
of  the  axis  round  which  all  should  turn,  but  nothing  turned 
and  nothing  moved  and  the  angels  stirred  not  and  all  was  as 
still  as  a  stone,  and  I  was  myself  also,  like  the  rest,  as  still  as 
a  stone. 

Then  I  saw  some  huge,  cloud-like  forms  nearing,  and  be- 
hold! it  was  the  Lord  bringing  two  of  his  children  by  the 
hand. 

"O  Papa !"  said  one,  "isn't  it  pretty  ?" 

"Yes,  my  dear,"  said  the  Lord,  "and  if  you  drop  a  penny 
into  the  box  the  figures  will  work." 

Then  I  saw  that  what  I  had  taken  for  the  keyboard  of  the 
organ  was  no  keyboard  but  only  a  slit,  and  one  of  the  little 
Lords  dropped  a  plaque  of  metal  into  it.  And  then  the  angels 
played  and  the  world  turned  round  and  the  organ  made  a 
noise  and  the  people  began  killing  one  another  and  the  two 
little  Lords  clapped  their  hands  and  were  delighted. 

Handel  and  Dickens 

They  buried  Dickens  in  the  very  next  grave,  cheek  by 
jowl  with  Handel.  It  does  not  matter,  but  it  pained  me  to 
think  that  people  who  could  do  this  could  become  Deans  of 
Westminster. 


IX 
A  Painter's  Views  on  Painting 


The  Old  Masters  and  Their  Pupils 

THE  old  masters  taught,  not  because  they  liked  teaching,  nor 
yet  from  any  idea  of  serving  the  cause  of  art,  nor  yet  because 
they  were  paid  to  teach  by  the  parents  of  their  pupils.  The 
parents  probably  paid  no  money  at  first.  The  masters  took 
pupils  and  taught  them  because  they  had  more  work  to  do 
than  they  could  get  through  and  wanted  some  one  to  help 
them.  They  sold  the  pupil's  work  as  their  own,  just  as  people 
do  now  who  take  apprentices.  When  people  can  sell  a  pupil's 
work,  they  will  teach  the  pupil  all  they  know  and  will  see 
he  learns  it.  This  is  the  secret  of  the  whole  matter. 

The  modern  schoolmaster  does  not  aim  at  learning  from 
his  pupils,  he  hardly  can,  but  the  old  masters  did.  See  how 
Giovanni  Bellini  learned  from  Titian  and  Giorgione  who  both 
came  to  him  in  the  same  year,  as  boys,  when  Bellini  was  63 
years  old.  What  a  day  for  painting  was  that !  All  Bellini's 
best  work  was  done  thenceforward.  I  know  nothing  in  the 
history  of  art  so  touching  as  this.  [1883.] 

P.S.  I  have  changed  my  mind  about  Titian.  I  don't  like 
him.  [1897.] 

The  Academic  System  and  Repentance 

The  academic  system  goes  almost  on  the  principle  of  offer- 
ing places  for  repentance,  and  letting  people  fall  soft,  by 
assuming  that  they  should  be  taught  how  to  do  things  before 
they  do  them,  and  not  by  the  doing  of  them.  Good  economy 
requires  that  there  should  be  little  place  for  repentance,  and 
that  when  people  fall  they  should  fall  hard  enough  to  re- 
member it. 

135 


136  A  Painter's  Views 

The  Jubilee  Sixpence 

We  have  spent  hundreds  of  thousands,  or  more  probably 
of  millions,  on  national  art  collections,  schools  of  art,  pre- 
liminary training  and  academicism,  without  wanting  anything 
in  particular,  but  when  the  nation  did  at  last  try  all  it  knew 
to  design  a  sixpence,  it  failed.*  The  other  coins  are  all  very 
well  in  their  way,  and  so  are  the  stamps — the  letters  get  car- 
ried, and  the  money  passes ;  but  both  stamps  and  coins  would 
have  been  just  as  good,  and  very  likely  better,  if  there  had 
not  been  an  art-school  in  the  country.  [1888.] 

Studying  from  Nature 

When  is  a  man  studying  from  nature,  and  when  is  he  only 
flattering  himself  that  he  is  doing  so  because  he  is  painting 
with  a  model  or  lay-figure  before  him  ?  A  man  may  be  work- 
ing his  eight  or  nine  hours  a  day  from  the  model  and  yet  not 
be  studying  from  nature.  He  is  painting  but  not  studying. 
He  is  like  the  man  in  the  Bible  who  looks  at  himself  in  a  glass 
and  goeth  away  forgetting  what  manner  of  man  he  was.  He 
will  know  no  more  about  nature  at  the  end  of  twenty  years 
than  a  priest  who  has  been  reading  his  breviary  day  after  day 
without  committing  it  to  memory  will  know  of  its  contents. 
Unless  he  gets  what  he  has  seen  well  into  his  memory,  so  as 
to  have  it  at  his  fingers'  ends  as  familiarly  as  the  characters 
with  which  he  writes  a  letter,  he  can  be  no  more  held  to  be 
familiar  with,  and  to  have  command  over,  nature  than  a  man 
who  only  copies  his  signature  from  a  copy  kept  in  his  pocket, 
as  I  have  known  French  Canadians  do,  can  be  said  to  be  able 
to  write.  It  is  painting  without  nature  that  will  give  a  man 
this,  and  not  painting  directly  from  her.  He  must  do  both 
the  one  and  the  other,  and  the  one  as  much  as  the  other. 

The  Model  and  the  Lay-Figure 

It  may  be  doubted  whether  they  have  not  done  more  harm 
than  good.  They  are  an  attempt  to  get  a  bit  of  stuffed  nature 

*  If  I  remember  right,  the  original  Jubilee  sixpence  had  to  be 
altered  because  it  was  so  like  a  half-sovereign  that,  on  being  gilded,  it 
passed  as  one. 


on  Painting  13? 

and  to  study  from  that  instead  of  studying  from  the  thing 
itself.  Indeed,  the  man  who  never  has  a  model  but  studies 
the  faces  of  people  as  they  sit  opposite  him  in  an  omnibus, 
and  goes  straight  home  and  puts  down  what  little  he  can  of 
what  he  has  seen,  dragging  it  out  piecemeal  from  his  memory, 
and  going  into  another  omnibus  to  look  again  for  what  he 
has  forgotten  as  near  as  he  can  find  it — that  man  is  studying 
from  nature  as  much  as  he  who  has  a  model  four  or  five  hours 
daily — and  probably  more.  For  you  may  be  painting  from 
nature  as  much  without  nature  actually  before  you  as  with ; 
and  you  may  have  nature  before  you  all  the  while  you  are 
painting  and  yet  not  be  painting  from  her. 

Sketching  from  Nature 

Is  very  like  trying  to  put  a  pinch  of  salt  on  her  tail.  And 
yet  many  manage  to  do  it  very  nicely. 

Great  Art  and  Sham  Art 

Art  has  no  end  in  view  save  the  emphasising  and  recording 
in  the  most  effective  way  some  strongly  felt  interest  or  affec- 
tion. Where  there  is  neither  interest  nor  desire  to  record 
with  good  effect,  there  is  but  sham  art,  or  none  at  all :  where 
both  these  are  fully  present,  no  matter  how  rudely  and  in- 
articulately, there  is  great  art.  Art  is  at  best  a  dress,  im- 
portant, yet  still  nothing  in  comparison  with  the  wearer,  and, 
as  a  general  rule,  the  less  it  attracts  attention  the  better. 

Inarticulate  Touches 

An  artist's  touches  are  sometimes  no  more  articulate  than 
the  barking  of  a  dog  who  would  call  attention  to  something 
without  exactly  knowing  what.  This  is  as  it  should  be,  and 
he  is  a  great  artist  who  can  be  depended  on  not  to  bark  at 
nothing. 

Detail 

One  reason  why  it  is  as  well  not  to  give  very  much  detail 
is  that,  no  matter  how  much  is  given,  the  eye  will  always  want 
more ;  it  will  know  very  well  that  it  is  not  being  paid  in  full. 


138  A  Painter's  Views 

On  the  other  hand,  no  matter  how  little  one  gives,  the  eye 
will  generally  compromise  by  wanting  only  a  little  more.  In 
either  case  the  eye  will  want  more,  so  one  may  as  well  stop 
sooner  as  later.  Sensible  painting,  like  sensible  law,  sensible 
writing,  or  sensible  anything  else,  consists  as  much  in  knowing 
what  to  omit  as  what  to  insist  upon.  It  consists  in  the  tact 
that  tells  the  painter  where  to  stop. 

Painting  and  Association 

Painting  is  only  possible  by  reason  of  association's  not  stick- 
ing to  the  letter  of  its  bond,  so  that  we  jump  to  conclusions. 

The  Credulous  Eye 

Painters  should  remember  that  the  eye,  as  a  general  rule,  is 
a  good,  simple,  credulous  organ — very  ready  to  take  things  on 
trust  if  it  be  told  them  with  any  confidence  of  assertion. 

Truths  from  Nature 

We  must  take  as  many  as  we  can,  but  the  difficulty  is  that 
it  is  often  so  hard  to  know  what  the  truths  of  nature  are. 

Accuracy 

After  having  spent  years  striving  to  be  accurate,  we  must 
spend  as  many  more  in  discovering  when  and  how  to  be  in- 
accurate. 

Herbert  Spencer 
He  is  like  nature  to  Fuseli — he  puts  me  out. 

Shade  Colour  and  Reputation 

When  a  thing  is  near  and  in  light,  colour  and  form  are  im- 
portant; when  far  and  in  shadow,  they  are  unimportant. 
Form  and  colour  are  like  reputations  which  when  they  be- 
come shady  are  much  of  a  muchness. 


on  Painting  139 

Money  and  Technique 

Money  is  very  like  technique  (or  vice  versa).  We  see  that 
both  musicians  or  painters  with  great  command  of  technique 
seldom  know  what  to  do  with  it,  while  those  who  have  little 
often  know  how  to  use  what  they  have. 

Action  and  Study 

These  things  are  antagonistic.  The  composer  is  seldom  a 
great  theorist ;  the  theorist  is  never  a  great  composer.  Each 
is  equally  fatal  to  and  essential  in  the  other. 

Sacred  and  Profane  Statues 

I  have  never  seen  statues  of  Jove,  Neptune,  Apollo  or  any 
of  the  pagan  gods  that  are  not  as  great  failures  as  the  statues 
of  Christ  and  the  Apostles. 

Seeing 

If  a  man  has  not  studied  painting,  or  at  any  rate  black  and 
white  drawing,  his  eyes  are  wild ;  learning  to  draw  tames 
them.  The  first  step  towards  taming  the  eyes  is  to  teach 
them  not  to  see  too  much. 

Quickness  in  seeing  as  in  everything  else  comes  from  long 
sustained  effort  after  Tightness  and  comes  unsought.  It  never 
comes  from  effort  after  quickness. 

Improvement  in  Art 

Painting  depends  upon  seeing;  seeing  depends  upon  look- 
ing for  this  or  that,  at  least  in  great  part  it  does  so. 

Think  of  and  look  at  your  work  as  though  it  were  done  by 
your  enemy.  If  you  look  at  it  to  admire  it  you  are  lost. 

Any  man,  as  old  Heatherley  used  to  say,  will  go  on  im- 
proving as  long  as  he  is  bona  fide  dissatisfied  with  his  work. 

Improvement  in  one's  painting  depends  upon  how  we  look 
at  our  work.  If  we  look  at  it  to  see  where  it  is  wrong,  we 
shall  see  this  and  make  it  righter.  If  we  look  at  it  to  see 


140  A  Painter's  Views 

where  it  is  right,  we  shall  see  this  and  shall  not  make  it  righter. 
We  cannot  see  it  both  wrong  and  right  at  the  same  time. 

Light  and  Shade 

Tell  the  young  artist  that  he  wants  a  black  piece  here  or 
there,  when  he  sees  no  such  black  piece  in  nature,  and  that 
he  must  continue  this  or  that  shadow  thus,  and  break  this 
light  into  this  or  that  other,  when  in  nature  he  sees  none  of 
these  things,  and  you  will  puzzle  him  very  much.  He  is  try- 
ing to  put  down  what  he  sees ;  he  does  not  care  two  straws 
about  composition  or  light  and  shade;  if  he  sees  two  tones 
of  such  and  such  relative  intensity  in  nature,  he  will  give 
them  as  near  as  he  can  the  same  relative  intensity  in  his 
picture,  and  to  tell  him  that  he  is  perhaps  exactly  to  reverse 
the  natural  order  in  deference  to  some  canon  of  the  academi- 
cians, and  that  at  the  same  time  he  is  drawing  from  nature, 
is  what  he  cannot  understand. 

I  am  very  doubtful  how  far  people  do  not  arrange  their 
light  and  shade  too  much  with  the  result  with  which  we  are 
familiar  in  drawing-masters'  copies;  it  may  be  right  or  it 
may  not,  I  don't  know — I  am  afraid  I  ought  to  know,  but  I 
don't;  but  I  do  know  that  those  pictures  please  me  best 
which  were  painted  without  the  slightest  regard  to  any  of 
these  rules. 

I  suppose  the  justification  of  those  who  talk  as  above  lies 
in  the  fact  that,  as  we  cannot  give  all  nature,  we  lie  by  sup- 
pressio  veri  whether  we  like  it  or  no,  and  that  you  sometimes 
lie  less  by  putting  in  something  which  does  not  exist  at  the 
moment,  but  which  easily  might  exist  and  which  gives  a  lot 
of  facts  which  you  otherwise  could  not  give  at  all,  than  by 
giving  so  much  as  you  can  alone  give  if  you  adhere  rigidly  to 
the  facts.  If  this  is  so  the  young  painter  would  understand 
the  matter,  if  it  were  thus  explained  to  him,  better  than  he 
is  likely  to  do  if  he  is  merely  given  it  as  a  canon. 

At  the  same  time,  I  admit  it  to  be  true  that  one  never  sees 
light  but  it  has  got  dark  in  it,  nor  vice  versa,  and  that  this 
comes  to  saying  that  if  you  are  to  be  true  to  nature  you  must 
break  your  lights  into  your  shadows  and  vice  versa;  and  so 
usual  is  this  that,  if  there  happens  here  or  there  to  be  an  ex- 
ception, the  painter  had  better  say  nothing  about  it,  for  it  is 


on  Painting  141 

more  true  to  nature's  general  practice  not  to  have  it  so  than 
to  have  it. 

Certainly  as  regards  colour,  I  never  remember  to  have 
seen  a  piece  of  one  colour  without  finding  a  bit  of  a  very 
similar  colour  not  far  off,  but  having  no  connection  with  it. 
This  holds  good  in  such  an  extraordinary  way  that  if  it 
happens  to  fail  the  matter  should  be  passed  over  in  silence. 

Colour 

The  expression  "seeing  colour"  used  to  puzzle  me.  I 
was  aware  that  some  painters  made  their  pictures  more  pleas- 
ing in  colour  than  others  and  more  like  the  colour  of  the 
actual  thing  as  a  whole,  still  there  were  any  number  of  bits 
of  brilliant  colour  in  their  work  which  for  the  life  of  me  I 
could  not  see  in  nature.  I  used  to  hear  people  say  of  a  man 
who  got  pleasing  and  natural  colour,  "Does  he  not  see  colour 
well?"  and  I  used  to  say  he  did,  but,  as  far  as  I  was  con- 
cerned, it  would  have  been  more  true  to  say  that  he  put 
down  colour  which  he  did  not  see  well,  or  at  any  rate  that 
he  put  down  colour  which  I  could  not  see  myself. 

In  course  of  time  I  got  to  understand  that  seeing  colour 
does  not  mean  inventing  colour,  or  exaggerating  it,  but  being 
on  the  look  out  for  it,  thus  seeing  it  where  another  will  not 
see  it,  and  giving  it  the  preference  as  among  things  to  be 
preserved  and  rendered  amid  the  wholesale  slaughter  of  in- 
nocents which  is  inevitable  in  any  painting.  Painting  is  only 
possible  as  a  quasi-hieroglyphic  epitomising  of  nature;  this 
means  that  the  half  goes  for  the  whole,  whereon  the  ques- 
tion arises  which  half  is  to  be  taken  and  which  made  to  go? 
The  colourist  will  insist  by  preference  on  the  coloured  half, 
the  man  who  has  no  liking  for  colour,  however  much  else 
he  may  sacrifice,  will  not  be  careful  to  preserve  this  and,  as 
a  natural  consequence,  he  will  not  preserve  it. 

Good,  that  is  to  say,  pleasing,  beautiful,  or  even  pretty 
colour  cannot  be  got  by  putting  patches  of  pleasing,  beautiful 
or  pretty  colour  upon  one's  canvas  and,  which  is  a  harder 
matter,  leaving  them  when  they  have  been  put.  It  is  said  of 
money  that  it  is  more  easily  made  than  kept  and  this  is  true 
of  many  things,  such  as  friendship;  and  even  life  itself  is 
more  easily  got  than  kept.  The  same  holds  good  of  colour. 


142  A  Painter's  Views 

It  is  also  true  that,  as  with  money,  more  is  made^by  saving 
than  in  any  other  way,  and  the  surest  way  to  lose  colour 
is  to  play  with  it  inconsiderately,  not  knowing  how  to  leave 
well  alone.  A  touch  of  pleasing  colour  should  on  no  account 
be  stirred  without  consideration. 

That  we  can  see  in  a  natural  object  more  colour  than 
strikes  us  at  a  glance,  if  we  look  for  it  attentively,  will  not 
be  denied  by  any  who  have  tried  to  look  for  it.  Thus,  take 
a  dull,  dead,  level,  grimy  old  London  wall :  at  a  first  glance 
we  can  see  no  colour  in  it,  nothing  but  a  more  or  less  purplish 
mass,  got,  perhaps  as  nearly  as  in  any  other  way,  by  a  tint 
mixed  with  black,  Indian  red  and  white.  If,  however,  we 
look  for  colour  in  this,  we  shall  find  here  and  there  a  broken 
brick  with  a  small  surface  of  brilliant  crimson,  hard  by  there 
will  be  another  with  a  warm  orange  hue  perceivable  through 
the  grime  by  one  who  is  on  the  look  out  for  it,  but  by  no  one 
else.  Then  there  may  be  bits  of  old  advertisement  of  which 
here  and  there  a  gaily  coloured  fragment  may  remain,  or  a 
rusty  iron  hook  or  a  bit  of  bright  green  moss ;  few  indeed  are 
the  old  walls,  even  in  the  grimiest  parts  of  London,  on  which 
no  redeeming  bits  of  colour  can  be  found  by  those  who  are 
practised  in  looking  for  them.  To  like  colour,  to  wish  to 
find  it,  and  thus  to  have  got  naturally  into  a  habit  of  looking 
for  it,  this  alone  will  enable  a  man  to  see  colour  and  to  make 
a  note  of  it  when  he  has  seen  it,  and  this  alone  will  lead  him 
towards  a  pleasing  and  natural  scheme  of  colour  in  his  work. 

Good  colour  can  never  be  got  by  putting  down  colour 
which  is  not  seen ;  at  any  rate  only  a  master  who  has  long 
served  accuracy  can  venture  on  occasional  inaccuracy — 
telling  a  lie,  knowing  it  to  be  a  lie,  and  as,  se  non  vera,  ben 
trovata.  The  grown  man  in  his  art  may  do  this,  and  indeed 
is  not  a  man  at  all  unless  he  knows  how  to  do  it  daily  and 
hourly  without  departure  from  the  truth  even  in  his  boldest 
lie;  but  the  child  in  art  must  stick  to  what  he  sees.  If  he 
looks  harder  he  will  see  more,  and  may  put  more,  but  till  he 
sees  it  without  being  in  any  doubt  about  it,  he  must  not  put 
it.  There  is  no  such  sure  way  of  corrupting  one's  colour  sense 
as  the  habitual  practice  of  putting  down  colour  which  one 
does  not  see ;  this  and  the  neglecting  to  look  for  it  are  equal 
faults.  The  first  error  leads  to  melodramatic  vulgarity,  the 
other  to  torpid  dullness,  and  it  is  hard  to  say  which  is  worse. 


on  Painting  H3 

It  may  be  said  that  the  preservation  of  all  the  little  episodes 
of  colour  which  can  be  discovered  in  an  object  whose  general 
effect  is  dingy  and  the  suppression  of  nothing  but  the  un- 
interesting colourless  details  amount  to  what  is  really  a  forc- 
ing and  exaggeration  of  nature,  differing  but  little  from 
downright  fraud,  so  far  as  its  effect  goes,  since  it  gives  an 
undue  preference  to  the  colour  side  of  the  matter.  In  equity, 
if  the  exigencies  of  the  convention  under  which  we  are  work- 
ing require  a  sacrifice  of  a  hundred  details,  the  majority  of 
which  are  uncoloured,  while  in  the  minority  colour  can  be 
found  if  looked  for,  the  sacrifice  should  be  made  pro  rata 
from  coloured  and  uncoloured  alike.  If  the  facts  of  nature 
are  a  hundred,  of  which  ninety  are  dull  in  colour  and  ten  in- 
teresting, and  the  painter  can  only  give  ten,  he  must  not  give 
the  ten  interesting  bits  of  colour  and  neglect  the  ninety  so- 
berly coloured  details.  Strictly,  he  should  sacrifice  eighty-one 
sober  details  and  nine  coloured  ones;  he  will  thus  at  any 
rate  preserve  the  balance  and  relation  which  obtain  in  nature 
between  coloured  and  uncoloured. 

This,  no  doubt,  is  what  he  ought  to  do  if  he  leaves  the 
creative,  poetic  and  more  properly  artistic  aspect  of  his  own" 
function  out  of  the  question ;  if  he  is  making  himself  a  mere 
transcriber,  holding  the  mirror  up  to  nature  with  such  en- 
tire forgetfulness  of  self  as  to  be  rather  looking-glass  than 
man,  this  is  what  he  must  do.  But  the  moment  he  ap. 
proaches  nature  in  this  spirit  he  ceases  to  be  an  artist,  and 
the  better  he  succeeds  as  painter  of  something  that  might 
pass  for  a  coloured  photograph,  the  more  inevitably  must 
he  fail  to  satisfy,  or  indeed  to  appeal  to  us  at  all  as  poet — 
as  one  whose  sympathies  with  nature  extend  beyond  her 
superficial  aspect,  or  as  one  who  is  so  much  at  home  with 
her  as  to  be  able  readily  to  dissociate  the  permanent  and 
essential  from  the  accidental  which  may  be  here  to-day  and 
gone  to-morrow.  If  he  is  to  come  before  us  as  an  artist, 
he  must  do  so  as  a  poet  or  creator  of  that  which  is  not,  as 
well  as  a  mirror  of  that  which  is.  True,  experience  in  all 
kinds  of  poetical  work  shows  that  the  less  a  man  creates  the 
better,  that  the  more,  in  fact,  he  makes,  the  less  is  he  of  a 
maker;  but  experience  also  shows  that  the  course  of  true 
nature,  like  that  of  true  love,  never  does  run  smooth,  and 
that  occasional,  judicious,  slight  departures  from  the  actual 


144  A  Painter's  Views 

facts,  by  one  who  knows  the  value  of  a  lie  too  well  to  waste 
it,  bring  nature  more  vividly  and  admirably  before  us  than 
any  amount  of  adherence  to  the  letter  of  strict  accuracy. 
It  is  the  old  story,  the  letter  killeth  but  the  spirit  giveth 
life. 

With  colour,  then,  he  who  does  not  look  for  it  will  begin 
by  not  seeing  it  unless  it  is  so  obtrusive  that  there  is  no 
escaping  it ;  he  will  therefore,  in  his  rendering  of  the  hundred 
facts  of  nature  above  referred  to,  not  see  the  ten  coloured 
bits  at  all,  supposing  them  to  be,  even  at  their  brightest, 
somewhat  sober,  and  his  work  will  be  colourless  or  disagree- 
able in  colour.  The  faithful  coypist,  who  is  still  a  mere  copy- 
ist, will  give  nine  details  of  dull  uninteresting  colour  and  one 
of  interesting.  The  artist  or  poet  will  find  some  reason 
for  slightly  emphasising  the  coloured  details  and  will  scatter 
here  and  there  a  few  slight,  hardly  perceptible,  allusions  to 
more  coloured  details  than  come  within  the  letter  of  his  bond, 
but  will  be  careful  not  to  overdo  it.  The  vulgar  sensational 
painter  will  force  in  his  colour  everywhere,  and  of  all  col- 
ourists  he  must  be  pronounced  the  worst. 

Briefly  then,  to  see  colour  is  simply  to  have  got  into  a 
habit  of  not  overlooking  the  patches  of  colour  which  are 
seldom  far  to  seek  or  hard  to  see  by  those  who  look  for  them. 
It  is  not  the  making  one's  self  believe  that  one  sees  all  man- 
ner of  colours  which  are  not  there,  it  is  only  the  getting 
oneself  into  a  mental  habit  of  looking  out  for  episodes  of 
colour,  and  of  giving  them  a  somewhat  undue  preference  in 
the  struggle  for  rendering,  wherever  anything  like  a  reason- 
able pretext  can  be  found  for  doing  so.  For  if  a  picture  is  to 
be  pleasing  in  colour,  pleasing  colours  must  be  put  upon  the 
canvas,  and  reasons  have  got  to  be  found  for  putting  them 
there.  [1886.] 

P.S. — The  foregoing  note  wants  a  great  deal  of  reconsid- 
eration for  which  I  cannot  find  time  just  now.  Jan.  31,  1898. 

Words  and  Colour 

A  man  cannot  be  a  great  colourist  unless  he  is  a  great 
deal  more.  A  great  colourist  is  no  better  than  a  great  wordist 
unless  the  colour  is  well  applied  to  a  subject  which  at  any 
rate  is  not  repellent. 


on  Painting  145 


Amateurs  and  Professionals 

There  is  no  excuse  for  amateur  work  being  bad.  Amateurs 
often  excuse  their  shortcomings  on  the  ground  that  they  are 
not  professionals,  the  professional  could  plead  with  greater 
justice  that  he  is  not  an  amateur.  The  professional  has  not, 
he  might  well  say,  the  leisure  and  freedom  from  money 
anxieties  which  will  let  him  devote  himself  to  his  art  in  single- 
ness of  heart,  telling  of  things  as  he  sees  them  without  fear 
of  what  man  shall  say  unto  him;  he  must  think  not  of  what 
appears  to  him  right  and  loveable  but  of  what  his  patrons 
will  think  and  of  what  the  critics  will  tell  his  patrons  to  say 
they  think ;  he  has  got  to  square  everyone  all  round  and  will 
assuredly  fail  to  make  his  way  unless  he  does  this ;  if,  then, 
he  betrays  his  trust  he  does  so  under  temptation.  Whereas 
the  amateur  who  works  with  no  higher  aim  than  that  of 
immediate  recognition  betrays  it  from  the  vanity  and  wanton- 
ness of  his  spirit.  The  one  is  naughty  because  he  is  needy, 
the  other  from  natural  depravity.  Besides,  the  amateur 
can  keep  his  work  to  himself,  whereas  the  professional  man 
must  exhibit  or  starve. 

The  question  is  what  is  the  amateur  an  amateur  of  ?  What 
is  he  really  in  love  with?  Is  he  in  love  with  other  people, 
thinking  he  sees  something  which  he  would  like  to  show 
them,  which  he  feels  sure  they  would  enjoy  if  they  could  only 
see  it  as  he  does,  which  he  is  therefore  trying  as  best  he  can 
to  put  before  the  few  nice  people  whom  he  knows?  If  this 
is  his  position  he  can  do  no  wrong,  the  spirit  in  which  he 
works  will  ensure  that  his  defects  will  be  only  as  bad  spelling 
or  bad  grammar  in  some  pretty  saying  of  a  child.  If,  on  the 
other  hand,  he  is  playing  for  social  success  and  to  get  a 
reputation  for  being  clever,  then  no  matter  how  dexterous  his 
work  may  be,  it  is  but  another  mode  of  the  speaking  with 
the  tongues  of  men  and  angels  without  charity ;  it  is  as  sound- 
ing brass  or  a  tinkling  cymbal,  full  of  sound  and  fury  signi- 
fying nothing. 

The  Ansidei  Raffaelle 

This  picture  is  inspired  by  no  deeper  feeling  than  a  de- 
termination to  adhere  to  the  conventions  of  the  time.  These 


146  A  Painter's  Views 

conventions  ensure  an  effect  of  more  or  less  devotional  char- 
acter, and  this,  coupled  with  our  reverence  for  the  name  of 
Raffaelle,  the  sentiments  arising  from  antiquity  and  foreign- 
ness,  and  the  inability  of  most  people  to  judge  of  the  work  on 
technical  grounds,  because  they  can  neither  paint  nor  draw, 
prevents  us  from  seeing  what  a  mere  business  picture  it  is 
and  how  poor  the  painting  is  throughout.  A  master  in  any 
art  should  be  first  man,  then  poet,  then  craftsman;  this 
picture  must  have  been  painted  by  one  who  was  first  world- 
ling, then  religious-property-manufacturer,  then  painter  with 
brains  not  more  than  average  and  no  heart. 

The  Madonna's  head  has  indeed  a  certain  prettiness  of  a 
not  very  uncommon  kind ;  the  paint  has  been  sweetened  with 
a  soft  brush  and  licked  smooth  till  all  texture  as  of  flesh  is 
gone  and  the  head  is  wooden  and  tight;  I  can  see  no  ex- 
pression in  it ;  the  hand  upon  the  open  book  is  as  badly  drawn 
as  the  hand  of  S.  Catharine  (also  by  Raffaelle)  in  our  gal- 
lery, or  even  worse ;  so  is  the  part  of  the  other  hand  which  can 
be  seen;  they  are  better  drawn  than  the  hands  in  the  Ecce 
homo  of  Correggio  in  our  gallery,  for  the  fingers  appear  to 
have  the  right  number  of  joints,  which  none  of  those  in  the 
Correggio  have,  but  this  is  as  much  as  can  be  said. 

The  dress  is  poorly  painted,  the  gold  thread  work  being 
of  the  cheapest,  commonest  kind,  both  as  regards  pattern 
and  the  quantity  allowed;  especially  note  the  meagre  allow- 
ance and  poor  pattern  of  the  embroidery  on  the  virgin's 
bosom;  it  is  done  as  by  one  who  knew  she  ought  to  have, 
and  must  have,  a  little  gold  work,  but  was  determined  she 
should  have  no  more  than  he  could  help.  This  is  so  wher- 
ever there  is  gold  thread  work  in  the  picture.  It  .is  so  on 
S.  Nicholas's  cloak  where  a  larger  space  is  covered,  but  the 
pattern  is  dull  and  the  smallest  quantity  of  gold  is  made  to 
go  the  longest  way.  The  gold  cording  which  binds  this  is 
more  particularly  badly  done.  Compare  the 'embroidery  and 
gold  thread  work  in  "The  Virgin  adoring  the  Infant  Christ," 
ascribed  to  Andrea  Verrocchio,  No.  296,  Room  V ;  "The  An- 
nunciation" by  Carlo  Crivelli,  No.  739,  Room  VIII ;  in  "The 
Angel  Raphael  accompanies  Tobias  on  his  Journey  into 
Media"  attributed  to  Botticini,  No.  781,  Room  V;  in  "Por- 
trait of  a  Lady,"  school  of  Pollaiuolo,  No.  585,  Room  V ;  in 
"A  Canon  of  the  Church  with  his  Patron  Saints"  by  Ghee- 


on  Painting  147 

raert  David,  No.  1045,  Room  XI;  or  indeed  the  general 
run  of  the  gold  embroidery  of  the  period  as  shown  in  our 
gallery.* 

So  with  the  jewels ;  there  are  examples  of  jewels  in  most 
of  the  pictures  named  above,  none  of  them,  perhaps,  very 
first-rate,  but  all  of  them  painted  with  more  care  and  serious 
aim  than  the  eighteen-penny  trinket  which  serves  S.  Nicholas 
for  a  brooch.  The  jewels  in  the  mitre  are  rather  better  than 
this,  but  much  depends  upon  the  kind  of  day  on  which  the 
picture  is  seen;  on  a  clear  bright  day  they,  and  indeed  every 
part  of  the  picture,  look  much  worse  than  on  a  dull  one  because 
the  badness  can  be  more  clearly  seen.  As  for  the  mitre  itself, 
it  is  made  of  the  same  hard  unyielding  material  as  the  portico 
behind  the  saint,  whatever  this  may  be,  presumably  wood. 

Observe  also  the  crozier  which  S.  Nicholas  is  holding; 
observe  the  cheap  streak  of  high  light  exactly  the  same  thick- 
ness all  the  way  and  only  broken  in  one  place ;  so  with  the 
folds  in  the  draperies;  all  is  monotonous,  unobservant,  un- 
imaginative— the  work  of  a  feeble  man  whose  pains  will 
never  extend  much  beyond  those  necessary  to  make  him 
pass  as  stronger  than  he  is ;  especially  the  folds  in  the  white 
linen  over  S.  Nicholas's  throat,  and  about  his  girdle — weaker 
drapery  can  hardly  be  than  this,  unless,  perhaps,  that  from 
under  which  S.  Nicholas's  hands  come.  There  is  not  only  no 
art  here  to  conceal,  but  there  is  not  even  pains  to  conceal  the 
want  of  art.  As  for  the  hands  themselves,  and  indeed  all  the 
hands  and  feet  throughout  the  picture,  there  is  not  one  which 
is  even  tolerably  drawn  if  judged  by  the  standard  which 
Royal  Academicians  apply  to  Royal  Academy  students  now. 

Granted  that  this  is  an  early  work,  nevertheless  I  submit 
that  the  drawing  here  is  not  that  of  one  who  is  going  to  do 
better  by  and  by,  it  is  that  of  one  who  is  essentially  insincere 
and  who  will  never  aim  higher  than  immediate  success.  Those 

*  Raffaelle's  picture  "The  Virgin  and  Child  attended  by  S.  John 
the  Baptist  and  S.  Nicholas  of  Bari"  (commonly  known  as  the  "Ma- 
donna degli  Ansidei"),  No.  1171,  Room  VI  in  the  National  Gallery, 
London,  was  purchased  in  1885.  Butler  made  this  note  in  the  same 
year ;  he  revised  the  note  in  1897  but,  owing  to  changes  in  the  gallery 
and  in  the  attributions,  I  have  found  it  necessary  to  modernise  his 
descriptions  of  the  other  pictures  with  gold  thread  work  so  as  to  make 
them  agree  with  the  descriptions  now  (1912)  on  the  pictures  them- 
selves. 


148  A  Painter's  Views 

who  grow  to  the  best  work  almost  always  begin  by  laying 
great  stress  on  details  which  are  all  they  as  yet  have  strength 
for ;  they  cannot  do  much,  but  the  little  they  can  do  they 
do  and  never  tire  of  doing;  they  grow  by  getting  juster 
notions  of  proportion  and  subordination  of  parts  to  the 
whole  rather  than  by  any  greater  amount  of  care  and  pa- 
tience bestowed  upon  details.  Here  there  are  no  bits  of  detail 
worked  out  as  by  one  who  was  interested  in  them  and 
enjoyed  them.  Wherever  a  thing  can  be  scamped  it  is 
scamped.  As  the  whole  is,  so  are  the  details,  and  as  the  de- 
tails are,  so  is  the  whole;  all  is  tainted  with  eye-service  and 
with  a  vulgarity  not  the  less  profound  for  being  veiled  by  a 
due  observance  of  conventionality. 

I  shall  be  told  that  Raffaelle  did  come  to  draw  and  paint 
much  better  than  he  has  done  here.  I  demur  to  this.  He 
did  a  little  better;  he  just  took  so  much  pains  as  to  prevent 
him  from  going  down-hill  headlong,  and,  with  practice,  he 
gained  facility,  but  he  was  never  very  good,  either  as  a 
draughtsman  or  as  a  painter.  His  reputation,  indeed,  rests 
mainly  on  his  supposed  exquisitely  pure  and  tender  feeling. 
His  colour  is  admittedly  inferior,  his  handling  is  not  highly 
praised  by  any  one,  his  drawing  has  been  much  praised, 
but  it  is  of  a  penmanship  freehand  kind  which  is  particularly 
apt  to  take  people  in.  Of  course  he  could  draw  in  some  ways, 
no  one  giving  all  his  time  to  art  and  living  in  Raffaelle's 
surroundings  could,  with  even  ordinary  pains,  help  becoming 
a  facile  draughtsman,  but  it  is  the  expression  and  sentiment 
of  his  pictures  which  are  supposed  to  be  so  ineffable  and  to 
make  him  the  prince  of  painters. 

I  do  not  think  this  reputation  will  be  maintained  much 
longer.  I  can  see  no  ineffable  expression  in  the  Ansidei  Ma- 
donna's head,  nor  yet  in  that  of  the  Garvagh  Madonna  in 
our  gallery,  nor  in  the  S.  Catharine.  He  has  the  saint-touch, 
as  some  painters  have  the  tree-touch  and  others  the  water- 
touch.  I  remember  the  time  when  I  used  to  think  I 
saw  religious  feeling  in  these  last  two  pictures,  but  each 
time  I  see  them  I  wonder  more  and  more  how  I  can  have 
been  taken  in  by  them.  I  hear  people  admire  the  head  of 
S.  Nicholas  in  the  Ansidei  picture.  I  can  see  nothing  in  it 
beyond  the  power  of.  a  very  ordinary  painter,  and  nothing 
that  a  painter  of  more  than  very  ordinary  power  would  be 


on  Painting  149 

satisfied  with.  When  I  look  at  the  head  of  Bellini's  Doge, 
Loredano  Loredani,  I  can  see  defects,  as  every  one  can  see 
defects  in  every  picture,  but  the  more  I  see  it  the  more  I 
marvel  at  it,  and  the  more  profoundly  I  respect  the  painter. 
With  Raffaelle  I  find  exactly  the  reverse ;  I  am  carried  away 
at  first,  as  I  was  when  a  young  man  by  Mendelssohn's  Songs 
Without  Words,  only  to  be  very  angry  with  myself  presently 
on  finding  that  I  could  have  believed  even  for  a  short  time 
in  something  that  has  no  real  hold  upon  me.  I  know  the 
S.  Catharine  in  our  gallery  has  been  said  by  some  not  to  be 
by  Raffaelle.  No  one  will  doubt  its  genuineness  who  com- 
pares the  drawing,  painting  and  feeling  of  S.  Catharine's  eyes 
and  nose  with  those  of  the  S.  John  in  the  Ansidei  picture. 
The  doubts  have  only  been  raised  owing  to  the  fact  that  the 
picture,  being  hung  on  a  level  with  the  eye,  is  so  easily 
seen  to  be  bad  that  people  think  Raffaelle  cannot  have 
painted  it. 

Returning  to  the  S.  Nicholas;  apart  from  the  expression, 
or  as  it  seems  to  me  want  of  expression,  the  modelling  of  the 
head  is  not  only  poor  but  very  poor.  The  forehead  is  form- 
less and  boneless,  the  nose  is  entirely  wanting  in  that  play  of 
line  and  surface  which  an  old  man's  nose  affords ;  no  one  ever 
yet  drew  or  painted  a  nose  absolutely  as  nature  has  made 
it,  but  he  who  compares  carefully  drawn  noses,  as  that  in 
Rembrandt's  younger  portrait  of  himself,  in  his  old  woman, 
in  the  three  Van  Eycks,  in  the  Andrea  Solario,  in  the  Lore- 
dano Loredani  by  Bellini,  all  in  our  gallery,  with  the  nose  of 
Raffaelle's  S.  Nicholas  will  not  be  long  in  finding  out  how 
slovenly  Raffaelle's  treatment  in  reality  is.  Eyes,  eyebrows, 
mouth,  cheeks  and  chin  are  treated  with  the  same  weakness, 
and  this  not  the  weakness  of  a  child  who  is  taking  much  pains 
to  do  something  beyond  his  strength,  and  whose  intention  can 
be  felt  through  and  above  the  imperfections  of  his  perform- 
ance (as  in  the  case  of  the  two  Apostles'  heads  by  Giotto  in 
our  gallery),  but  of  one  who  is  not  even  conscious  of  weak- 
ness save  by  way  of  impatience  that  his  work  should  cost  him 
time  and  trouble  at  all,  and  who  is  satisfied  if  he  can  turn  it 
out  well  enough  to  take  in  patrons  who  have  themselves  never 
either  drawn  or  painted. 

Finally,  let  the  spectator  turn  to  the  sky  and  landscape. 
It  is  the  cheapest  kind  of  sky  with  no  clouds  and  going  down 


150  A  Painter's  Views 

as  low  as  possible,  so  as  to  save  doing  more  country  details 
than  could  be  helped.  As  for  the  little  landscape  there  is, 
let  the  reader  compare  it  with  any  of  the  examples  by  Bellini, 
Basaiti,  or  even  Cima  da  Conegliano,  which  may  be  found  in 
the  same  or  the  adjoining  rooms. 

How,  then,  did  Raffaelle  get  his  reputation?  It  may  be 
answered,  How  did  Virgil  get  his?  or  Dante?  or  Bacon?  or 
Plato?  or  Mendelssohn?  or  a  score  of  others  who  not  only 
get  the  public  ear  but  keep  it  sometimes  for  centuries? 
How  did  Guido,  Guercino  and  Domenichino  get  their  repu- 
tations ?  A  hundred  years  ago  these  men  were  held  as  hardly 
inferior  to  Raffaelle  himself.  They  had  a  couple  of  hundred 
years  or  so  of  triumph — why  so  much?  And  if  so  much, 
why  not  more?  If  we  begin  asking  questions,  we  may  ask 
why  anything  at  all  ?  Populus  vult  decipi  is  the  only  answer, 
and  nine  men  out  of  ten  will  follow  on  with  et  decipiatur. 
The  immediate  question,  however,  is  not  how  Raffaelle  came 
by  his  reputation  but  whether,  having  got  it,  he  will  continue 
to  hold  it  now  that  we  have  a  fair  amount  of  his  work  at 
the  National  Gallery. 

I  grant  that  the  general  effect  of  the  picture  if  looked  at 
as  a  mere  piece  of  decoration  is  agreeable,  but  I  have  seen 
many  a  picture  which  though  not  bearing  consideration  as  a 
serious  work  yet  looked  well  from  a  purely  decorative  stand- 
point. I  believe,  however,  that  at  least  half  of  those  who 
sit  gazing  before  this  Ansidei  Raffaelle  by  the  half-hour  at 
a  time  do  so  rather  that  they  may  be  seen  than  see;  half, 
again,  of  the  remaining  half  come  because  they  are  made  to 
do  so,  the  rest  see  rather  what  they  bring  with  them  and  put 
into  the  picture  than  what  the  picture  puts  into  them. 

And  then  there  is  the  charm  of  mere  age.  Any  Italian 
picture  of  the  early  part  of  the  sixteenth  century,  even  though 
by  a  worse  painter  than  Raffaelle,  can  hardly  fail  to  call  up 
in  us  a  solemn,  old-world  feeling,  as  though  we  had  stumbled 
unexpectedly  on  some  holy,  peaceful  survivors  of  an  age  long 
gone  by,  when  the  struggle  was  not  so  fierce  and  the  world 
was  a  sweeter,  happier  place  than  we  now  find  it,  when 
men  and  women  were  comelier,  and  we  should  like  to  have 
lived  among  them,  to  have  been  golden-hued  as  they,  to 
have  done  as  they  did;  we  dream  of  what  might  have  been 
if  our  lines  had  been  cast  in  more  pleasant  places — and 


on  Painting  i$r 

so  on,  all  of  it  rubbish,  but  still  not  wholly  unpleasant  rub- 
bish so  long  as  it  is  not  dwelt  upon. 

Bearing  in  mind  the  natural  tendency  to  accept  anything 
which  gives  us  a  peep  as  it  were  into  a  golden  age,  real  or 
imaginary,  bearing  in  mind  also  the  way  in  which  this  par- 
ticular picture  has  been  written  up  by  critics,  and  the  prestige 
of  Raffaelle's  name,  the  wonder  is  not  that  so  many  let 
themselves  be  taken  in  and  carried  away  with  it  but  that 
there  should  not  be  a  greater  gathering  before  it  than  there 
generally  is. 

Buying  a  Rembrandt 

As  an  example  of  the  evenness  of  the  balance  of  advantages 
between  the  principles  of  staying  still  and  taking  what  comes, 
and  going  about  to  look  for  things,*  I  might  mention  my  small 
Rembrandt,  "The  Robing  of  Joseph  before  Pharaoh."  I  have 
wanted  a  Rembrandt  all  my  life,  and  I  have  wanted  not  to 
give  more  than  a  few  shillings  for  it.  I  might  have  travelled 
all  Europe  over  for  no  one  can  say  how  many  years,  looking 
for  a  good  well-preserved,  forty-shilling  Rembrandt  (and 
this  was  what  I  wanted),  but  on  two  occasions  of  my  life 
cheap  Rembrandts  have  run  right  up  against  me.  The  first 
was  a  head  cut  out  of  a  ruined  picture  that  had  only  in  part 
escaped  destruction  when  Belvoir  Castle  was  burned  down 
at  the  beginning  of  this  century.  I  did  not  see  the  head  but 
have  little  doubt  it  was  genuine.  It  was  offered  me  for  a 
pound;  I  was  not  equal  to  the  occasion  and  did  not  at  once 
go  to  see  it  as  I  ought,  and  when  I  attended  to  it  some  months 
later  the  thing  had  gone.  My  only  excuse  must  be  that  I 
was  very  young. 

I  never  got  another  chance  till  a  few  weeks  ago  when  I 
saw  what  I  took,  and  take,  to  be  an  early,  but  very  interesting, 
work  by  Rembrandt  in  the  window  of  a  pawnbroker  opposite 
St.  Clement  Danes  Church  in  the  Strand.  I  very  nearly  let 
this  slip  too.  I  saw  it  and  was  very  much  struck  with  it, 
but,  knowing  that  I  am  a  little  apt  to  be  too  sanguine,  dis- 

*  Cf .  the  passage  in  Alps  and  Sanctuaries,  Chapter  XIII,  be- 
ginning "The  question  whether  it  is  better  to  abide  quiet  and  take 
advantages  of  opportunities  that  come  or  to  go  further  afield  in  search 
of  them  is  one  of  the  oldest  which  living  beings  have  had  to  deal 
with.  .  .  .  The  schism  still  lasts  and  has  resulted  in  two  great  sects — 
animals  and  plants." 


152  A  Painter's  Views 

trusted  my  judgment ;  in  the  evening  I  mentioned  the  picture 
to  Gogin  who  went  and  looked  at  it ;  finding  him  not  less 
impressed  than  I  had  been  with  the  idea  that  the  work  was 
an  early  one  by  Rembrandt,  I  bought  it,  and  the  more  I  look 
at  it  the  more  satisfied  I  am  that  we  are  right. 

People  talk  as  though  the  making  the  best  of  what  comes 
was  such  an  easy  matter,  whereas  nothing  in  reality  requires 
more  experience  and  good  sense.  It  is  only  those  who  know 
how  not  to  let  the  luck  that  runs  against  them  slip,  who  will 
be  able  to  find  things,  no  matter  how  long  and  how  far  they 
go  in  search  of  them.  [1887.] 

Trying  to  Buy  a  Bellini 

Flushed  with  triumph  in  the  matter  of  Rembrandt,  a  fort- 
night or  so  afterwards  I  was  at  Christie's  and  saw  two 
pictures  that  fired  me.  One  was  a  Madonna  and  Child  by 
Giovanni  Bellini,  I  do  not  doubt  genuine,  not  in  a  very  good 
state,  but  still  not  repainted.  The  Madonna  was  lovely,  the 
Child  very  good,  the  landscape  sweet  and  Belliniesque. 
I  was  much  smitten  and  determined  to  bid  up  to  a  hundred 
pounds ;  I  knew  this  would  be  dirt  cheap  and  was  not  going 
to  buy  at  all  unless  I  could  get  good  value.  I  bid  up  to  a 
hundred  guineas,  but  there  was  someone  else  bent  on  having 
it  and  when  he  bid  105  guineas  I  let  him  have  it,  not  without 
regret.  I  saw  in  the  Times  that  the  purchaser's  name  was 
Lesser. 

The  other  picture  I  tried  to  get  at  the  same  sale  (this 
day  week)  ;  it  was  a  small  sketch  numbered  72  (I  think)  and 
purporting  to  be  by  Giorgione  but,  I  fully  believe,  by  Titian. 
I  bid  up  to  £10  and  then  let  it  go.  It  went  for  £28,  and  I 
should  say  would  have  been  well  bought  at  £40.  [1887.] 

Watts 

I  was  telling  Gogin  how  I  had  seen  at  Christie's  some 
pictures  by  Watts  and  how  much  I  had  disliked  them.  He 
said  some  of  them  had  been  exhibited  in  Paris  a  few  years 
ago  and  a  friend  of  his  led  him  up  to  one  of  them  and  said 
in  a  serious,  puzzled,  injured  tone: 

"Mon  cher  ami,  racontez-moi  done  ceci,  s'il  vous  plait,"  as 


on  Painting  i$3 

though  their  appearance  in  such  a  place  at  all  were  some- 
thing that  must  have  an  explanation  not  obvious  upon  the 
face  of  it. 

Lombard  Portals 

The  crouching  beasts,  on  whose  backs  the  pillars  stand, 
generally  have  a  little  one  beneath  them  or  some  animal  which 
they  have  killed,  or  something,  in  fact,  to  give  them  occu- 
pation ;  it  was  felt  that,  though  an  animal  by  itself  was  well, 
an  animal  doing  something  was  much  better.  The  mere 
fact  of  companionship  and  silent  sympathy  is  enough  to 
interest,  but  without  this,  sculptured  animals  are  stupid,  as 
our  lions  in  Trafalgar  Square — which,  among  other  faults, 
have  that  of  being  much  too  well  done. 

So  Jones's  cat,  Prince,  picked  up  a  little  waif  in  the  court 
and  brought  it  home,  and  the  two  lay  together  and  were 
much  lovelier  than  Prince  was  by  himself.* 

Holbein  at  Basle 

How  well  he  has  done  Night  in  his  "Crucifixion"  !•  Also  he 
has  tried  to  do  the  Alps,  putting  them  as  background  to  the 
city,  but  he  has  not  done  them  as  we  should  do  them  now. 
I  think  the  tower  on  the  hill  behind  the  city  is  the  tower 
which  we  see  on  leaving  Basle  on  the  road  for  Lucerne,  I 
mean  I  think  Holbein  had  this  tower  in  his  head. 

Van  Eyck 

Van  Eyck  is  delightful  rather  in  spite  of  his  high  finish 
than  because  of  it.  De  Hooghe  finishes  as  highly  as  any  one 
need  do.  Van  Eyck's  finish  is  saved  because  up  to  the  last 
he  is  essentially  impressionist,  that  is,  he  keeps  a  just  account 
of  relative  importances  and  keeps  them  in  their  true  sub- 
ordination one  to  another.  The  only  difference  between  him 
and  Rembrandt  or  Velasquez  is  that  these,  as  a  general  rule, 
stay  their  hand  at  an  earlier  stage  of  impressionism. 

*  Prince  was  my  cat  when  I  lived  in  Barnard's  Inn.  He  used  to 
stray  into  Mr.  Kemp's  rooms  on  my  landing  (see  p.  131  ante).  Mrs. 
Kemp's  sister  brought  her  child  to  see  them,  and  the  child,  playing 
with  Prince  one  day,  made  a  discovery  and  exclaimed : 

"Oh !  it's  got  pins  in  its  toes." 

Butler  put  this  into  The  Way  of  all  Flesh. 


154     A  Painter's  Views  on  Painting 

Giotto 

There  are  few  modern  painters  who  are  not  greater 
technically  than  Giotto,  but  I  cannot  call  to  mind  a  single 
one  whose  work  impresses  me  as  profoundly  as  his  does. 
How  is  it  that  our  so  greatly  better  should  be  so  greatly  worse 
— that  the  farther  we  go  beyond  him  the  higher  he  stands 
above  us  ?  Time  no  doubt  has  much  to  do  with  it,  for,  great 
as  Giotto  was,  there  are  painters  of  to-day  not  less  so,  if 
they  only  dared  express  themselves  as  frankly  and  unaf- 
fectedly as  he  did. 

Early  Art 

The  youth  of  an  art  is,  like  the  youth  of  anything  else, 
its  most  interesting  period.  When  it  has  come  to  the  knowl- 
edge of  good  and  evil  it  is  stronger,  but  we  care  less  about  it. 

Sincerity 

It  is  not  enough  that  the  painter  should  make  the  spectator 
feel  what  he  meant  him  to  feel ;  he  must  also  make  him  feel 
that  this  feeling  was  shared  by  the  painter  himself  bona  fide 
and  without  affectation.  Of  all  the  lies  a  painter  can  tell  the 
worst  is  saying  that  he  likes  what  he  does  not  like.  But  the 
poor  wretch  seldom  knows  himself;  for  the  art  of  knowing 
what  gives  him  pleasure  has  been  so  neglected  that  it  has 
been  lost  to  all  but  a  very  few.  The  old  Italians  knew  well 
enough  what  they  liked  and  were  as  children  in  saying  it. 


x 

The  Position  of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri 

Triibner  and  Myself 

WHEN  I  went  back  to  Trubner,  after  Bogue  had  failed,  I 
had  a  talk  with  him  and  his  partner.  I  could  see  they  had 
lost  all  faith  in  my  literary  prospects.  Trubner  told  me  I 
was  a  homo  unius  libri,  meaning  Ereivhon.  He  said  I  was  in 
a  very  solitary  position.  I  replied  that  I  knew  I  was,  but  it 
suited  me.  I  said: 

"I  pay  my  way;  when  I  was  with  you  before,  I  never 
owed  you  money;  you  find  me  now  not  owing  my  publisher 
money,  but  my  publisher  in  debt  to  me ;  I  never  owe  so  much 
as  a  tailor's  bill;  beyond  secured  debts,  I  do  not  owe  £$  in 
the  world  and  never  have"  (which  is  quite  true).  "I  get 
my  summer's  holiday  in  Italy  every  year ;  I  live  very  quietly 
and  cheaply,  but  it  suits  my  health  and  tastes,  and  I  have 
no  acquaintances  but  those  I  value.  My  friends  stick  by  me. 
If  I  was  to  get  in  with  these  literary  and  scientific  people 
I  should  hate  them  and  they  me.  I  should  fritter  away  my 
time  and  my  freedom  without  getting  a  quid  pro  quo:  as  it 
is,  I  am  free  and  I  give  the  swells  every  now  and  then  such 
a  facer  as  they  get  from  no  one  else.  Of  course  I  don't  ex- 
pect to  get  on  in  a  commercial  sense  at  present,  I  do  not  go 
the  right  way  to  work  for  this;  but  I  am  going  the  right 
way  to  secure  a  lasting  reputation  and  this  is  what  I  do  care 
for.  A  man  cannot  have  both,  he  must  make  up  his  mind 
which  he  means  going  in  for.  I  have  gone  in  for  posthumous 
fame  and  I  see  no  step  in  my  literary  career  which  I  do  not 
think  calculated  to  promote  my  being  held  in  esteem  when  the 
heat  of  passion  has  subsided." 

Trubner  shrugged  his  shoulders.  He  plainly  does  not  be- 

155 


1 56  The  Position 

lieve  that  I  shall  succeed  in  getting  a  hearing;  he  thinks  the 
combination  of  the  religious  and  cultured  world  too  strong 
for  me  to  stand  against. 

If  he  means  that  the  reviewers  will  burke  me  as  far  as 
they  can,  no  doubt  he  is  right;  but  when  I  am  dead  there 
will  be  other  reviewers  and  I  have  already  done  enough  to 
secure  that  they  shall  from  time  to  time  look  me  up.  They 
won't  bore  me  then  but  they  will  be  just  like  the  present 
ones.  [1882.] 

Capping  a  Success 

When  I  had  written  Erewhon  people  wanted  me  at  once 
to  set  to  work  and  write  another  book  like  it.  How  could 
I  ?  I  cannot  think  how  I  escaped  plunging  into  writing  some 
laboured  stupid  book.  I  am  very  glad  I  did  escape.  Nothing 
is  so  cruel  as  to  try  and  force  a  man  beyond  his  natural 
pace.  If  he  has  got  more  stuff  in  him  it  will  come  out  in 
its  own  time  and  its  own  way:  if  he  has  not — let  the  poor 
wretch  alone;  to  have  done  one  decent  book  should  be 
enough ;  the  very  worst  way  to  get  another  out  of  him  is  to 
press  him.  The  more  promise  a  young  writer  has  given,  the 
more  his  friends  should  urge  him  not  to  over-tax  himself. 

A  Lady  Critic 

A  lady,  whom  I  meet  frequently  in  the  British  Museum 
reading-room  and  elsewhere,  said  to  me  the  other  day : 

"Why  don't  you  write  another  Erewhon?" 

"Why,  my  dear  lady,"  I  replied,  "Life  and  Habit  was  an- 
other Erewhon." 

They  say  these  things  to  me  continually  to  plague  me  and 
make  out  that  I  could  do  one  good  book  but  never  any 
more.  She  is  the  sort  of  person  who  if  she  had  known 
Shakespeare  would  have  said  to  him,  when  he  wrote  Henry 
the  IV th: 

"Ah,  Mr.  Shakespeare,  why  don't  you  write  us  another 
Titus  Andronicusf  Now  that  was  a  sweet  play,  that 
was." 

And  when  he  had  done  Antony  and  Cleopatra  she  would 
have  told  him  that  her  favourite  plays  were  the  three  parts 
of  King  Henry  VI. 


of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri  157 

Compensation 

If  I  die  prematurely,  at  any  rate  I  shall  be  saved  from 
being  bored  by  my  own  success. 

Hudibras  and  Erewhon 

I  was  completing  the  purchase  of  some  small  houses  at 
Lewisham  and  had  to  sign  my  name.  The  vendor,  merely 
seeing  the  name  and  knowing  none  of  my  books,  said  to  me, 
rather  rudely,  but  without  meaning  any  mischief: 

"Have  you  written  any  books  like  Hudibras?" 

I  said  promptly :  "Certainly ;  Erewhon  is  quite  as  good  a 
book  as  Hudibras." 

This  was  coming  it  too  strong  for  him,  so  he  thought  I 
had  not  heard  and  repeated  his  question.  I  said  again  as 
before,  and  he  shut  up.  I  sent  him  a  copy  of  Erewhon  im- 
mediately after  we  had  completed.  It  was  rather  tall  talk 
on  my  part,  I  admit,  but  he  should  not  have  challenged  me 
unprovoked. 

Life  and  Habit  and  Myself 

At  the  Century  Club  I  was  talking  with  a  man  who  asked 
me  why  I  did  not  publish  the  substance  of  what  I  had  been 
saying.  I  believed  he  knew  me  and  said : 

"Well,  you  know,  there's  Life  and  Habit." 

He  did  not  seem  to  rise  at  all,  so  I  asked  him  if  he  had  seen 
the  book. 

"Seen  it?"  he  answered.  "Why,  I  should  think  every 
one  has  seen  Life  and  Habit:  but  what's  that  got  to  do  with 
it?" 

I  said  it  had  taken  me  so  much  time  lately  that  I  had 
had  none  to  spare  for  anything  else.  Again  he  did  not  seem 
to  see  the  force  of  the  remark  and  a  friend,  who  was  close  by, 
said: 

"You  know,  Butler  wrote  Life  and  Habit." 

He  would  not  believe  it,  and  it  was  only  after  repeated 
assurance  that  he  accepted  it.  It  was  plain  he  thought  a 
great  deal  of  Life  and  Habit  and  had  idealised  its  author, 


158  The  Position 

whom  he  was  disappointed  to  find  so  very  commonplace  a 
person.  Exactly  the  same  thing  happened  to  me  with  Ere- 
whon.  I  was  glad  to  find  that  Life  and  Habit  had  made  so 
deep  an  impression  at  any  rate  upon  one  person. 

A  Disappointing  Person 

I  suspect  I  am  rather  a  disappointing  person,  for  every 
now  and  then  there  is  a  fuss  and  I  am  to  meet  some  one  who 
would  very  much  like  to  make  my  acquaintance,  or  some 
one  writes  me  a  letter  and  says  he  has  long  admired  my 
books,  and  may  he,  etc.?  Of  course  I  say  "Yes,"  but  ex- 
perience has  taught  me  that  it  always  ends  in  turning  some 
one  who  was  more  or  less  inclined  to  run  me  into  one  who 
considers  he  has  a  grievance  against  me  for  not  being  a  very 
different  kind  of  person  from  what  I  am.  These  people  how- 
ever (and  this  happens  on  an  average  once  or  twice  a  year) 
do  not  come  solely  to  see  me,  they  generally  tell  me 
all  about  themselves  and  the  impression  is  left  upon  me  that 
they  have  really  come  in  order  to  be  praised.  I  am  as 
civil  to  them  as  I  know  how  to  be  but  enthusiastic  I  never 
am,  for  they  have  never  any  of  them  been  nice  people,  and 
it  is  my  want  of  enthusiasm  for  themselves  as  much  as  any- 
thing else  which  disappoints  them.  They  seldom  come  again. 
Mr.  Alfred  Tylor  was  the  only  acquaintance  I  have 
ever  made  through  being  sent  for  to  be  looked  at,  or  letting 
some  one  come  to  look  at  me,  who  turned  out  a  valuable  ally ; 
but  then  he  sent  for  me  through  mutual  friends  in  the  usual 
way. 

Entertaining  Angels 

I  doubt  whether  any  angel  would  find  me  very  entertaining. 
As  for  myself,  if  ever  I  do  entertain  one  it  will  have  to  be 
unawares.  When  people  entertain  others  without  an  intro- 
duction they  generally  turn  out  more  like  devils  than  angels. 

Myself  and  My  Books 

The  balance  against  them  is  now  over  £350.  How  com- 
pletely they  must  have  been  squashed  unless  I  had  had  a 
little  money  of  my  own.  Is  it  not  likely  that  many  a  better 


of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri  159 

writer  than  I  am  is  squashed  through  want  of  money  ?  What- 
ever I  do  I  must  not  die  poor ;  these  examples  of  ill-requited 
labour  are  immoral,  they  discourage  the  effort  of  those 
who  could  and  would  do  good  things  if  they  did  not  know 
that  it  would  ruin  themselves  and  their  families;  moreover, 
they  set  people  on  to  pamper  a  dozen  fools  for  each  neglected 
man  of  me~rit,  out  of  compunction.  Genius,  they  say,  always 
wears  an  invisible  cloak;  these  men  wear  invisible  cloaks — 
therefore  they  are  geniuses;  and  it  flatters  them  to  think 
that  they  can  see  more  than  their  neighbours.  The  neglect 
of  one  such  man  as  the  author  of  Hudibras  is  compensated 
for  by  the  petting  of  a  dozen  others  who  would  be  the  first 
to  jump  upon  the  author  of  Hudibras  if  he  were  to  come  back 
to  life. 

Heaven  forbid  that  I  should  compare  myself  to  the  author 
of  Hudibras,  but  still,  if  my  books  succeed  after  my  death — 
which  they  may  or  may  not,  I  know  nothing  about  it — any 
way,  if  they  do  succeed,  let  it  be  understood  that  they  failed 
during  my  life  for  a  few  very  obvious  reasons  of  which  I 
was  quite  aware,  for  the  effect  of  which  I  was  prepared  before 
I  wrote  my  books,  and  which  on  consideration  I  found  in- 
sufficient to  deter  me.  I  attacked  people  who  were  at  once 
unscrupulous  and  powerful,  and  I  made  no  alliances.  I  did 
this  because  I  did  not  want  to  be  bored  and  have  my  time 
wasted  and  my  pleasures  curtailed.  I  had  money  enough 
to  live  fen,  and  preferred  addressing  myself  to  posterity  rather 
than  to  any  except  a  very  few  of  my  own  contemporaries. 
Those  few  I  have  always  kept  well  in  mind.  I  think  of 
them  continually  when  in  doubt  about  any  passage,  but  be- 
yond those  few  I  will  not  go.  Posterity  will  give  a  man  a 
fair  hearing;  his  own  times  will  not  do  so  if  he  is  attacking 
vested  interests,  and  I  have  attacked  two  powerful  sets  of 
vested  interests  at  once.  [The  Church  and  Science.]  What 
is  the  good  of  addressing  people  who  will  not  listen  ?  I  have 
addressed  the  next  generation  and  have  therefore  said  many 
things  which  want  time  before  they  become  palatable.  Any 
man  who  wishes  his  work  to  stand  will  sacrifice  a  good  deal 
of  his  immediate  audience  for  the  sake  of  being  attractive  to 
a  much  larger  number  of  people  later  on.  He  cannot  gain 
this  later  audience  unless  he  has  been  fearless  and  thorough- 
going, and  if  he  is  this  he  is  sure  to  have  to  tread  on  the 


160  The  Position 

corns  of  a  great  many  of  those  who  live  at  the  same  time 
with  him,  however  little  he  may  wish  to  do  so.  He  must 
not  expect  these  people  to  help  him  on,  nor  wonder  if,  for 
a  time,  they  succeed  in  snuffing  him  out.  It  is  part  of  the 
swim  that  it  should  be  so.  Only,  as  one  who  believes  himself 
to  have  practised  what  he  preaches,  let  me  assure  any  one 
who  has  money  of  his  own  that  to  write  fearlessly  for  pos- 
terity and  not  get  paid  for  it  is  much  better  fun  than  I  can 
imagine  its  being  to  write  like,  we  will  say,  George  Eliot  and 
make  a  lot  of  money  by  it.  [  1883.] 

Dragons 

People  say  that  there  are  neither  dragons  to  be  killed 
nor  distressed  maidens  to  be  rescued  nowadays.  I  do  not 
know,  but  I  think  I  have  dropped  across  one  or  two,  nor 
do  I  feel  sure  whether  the  most  mortal  wounds  have  been 
inflicted  by  the  dragons  or  by  myself. 

Trying  to  Know 

There  are  some  things  which  it  is  madness  not  to  try  to 
know  but  which  it  is  almost  as  much  madness  to  try  to  know. 
Sometimes  publishers,  hoping  to  buy  the  Holy  Ghost  with 
a  price,  fee  a  man  to  read  for  them  and  advise  them.  This  is 
but  as  the  vain  tossing  of  insomnia.  God  will  not  have  any 
human  being  know  what  will  sell,  nor  when  any  one  is  going 
to  die,  nor  anything  about  the  ultimate,  or  even  the  deeper, 
springs  of  growth  and  action,  nor  yet  such  a  little  thing  as 
whether  it  is  going  to  rain  to-morrow.  I  do  not  say  that  the 
impossibility  of  being  certain  about  these  and  similar  matters 
was  designed,  but  it  is  as  complete  as  though  it  had  been  not 
only  designed  but  designed  exceedingly  well. 

Squaring  Accounts 

We  owe  past  generations  not  only  for  the  master  discover- 
ies of  music,  science,  literature  and  art — few  of  which 
brought  profit  to  those  to  whom  they  were  revealed — but  also 
for  our  organism  itself  which  is  an  inheritance  gathered  and 


of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri  161 

garnered  by  those  who  have  gone  before  us.  What  money 
have  we  paid  not  for  Handel  and  Shakespeare  only  but  for 
our  eyes  and  ears? 

And  so  with  regard  to  our  contemporaries.  A  man  is 
sometimes  tempted  to  exclaim  that  he  does  not  fare  well 
at  the  hands  of  his  own  generation;  that,  although  he  may 
play  pretty  assiduously,  he  is  received  with  more  hisses  than 
applause;  that  the  public  is  hard  to  please,  slow  to  praise, 
and  bent  on  driving  as  hard  a  bargain  as  it  can.  This, 
howevef,  is  only  what  he  should  expect.  No  sensible  man 
will  suppose  himself  to  be  of  so  much  importance  that  his 
contemporaries  should  be  at  much  pains  to  get  at  the  truth 
concerning  him.  As  for  my  own  position,  if  I  say  the 
things  I  want  to  say  without  troubling  myself  about  the 
public,  why  should  I  grumble  at  the  public  for  not  troubling 
about  me?  Besides,  not  being  paid  myself,  I  can  in  better 
conscience  use  the  works  of  others,  as  I  daily  do,  without 
paying  for  them  and  without  being  at  the  trouble  of  praising 
or  thanking  them  more  than  I  have  a  mind  to.  And,  after 
all,  how  can  I  say  I  am  not  paid?  In  addition  to  all  that 
I  inherit  from  past  generations  I  receive  from  my  own  every- 
thing that  makes  life  worth  living — London,  with  its  infinite 
sources  of  pleasure  and  amusement,  good  theatres,  concerts, 
picture  galleries,  the  British  Museum  Reading-Room,  news- 
papers, a  comfortable  dwelling,  railways  and,  above  all,  the 
society  of  the  friends  I  value. 

Charles  Darwin  on  what  Sells  a  Book 

I  remember  when  I  was  at  Down  we  were  talking  of  what 
it  is  that  sells  a  book.  Mr.  Darwin  said  he  did  not  believe  it 
was  reviews  or  advertisements,  but  simply  "being  talked 
about"  that  sold  a  book. 

I  believe  he  is  quite  right  here,  but  surely  a  good  flaming 
review  helps  to  get  a  book  talked  about.  I  have  often  in- 
quired at  my  publishers'  after  a  review  and  I  never  found  one 
that  made  any  perceptible  increase  or  decrease  of  sale,  and 
the  same  with  advertisements.  I  think,  however,  that  the 
review  of  Erewhon  in  the  Spectator  did  sell  a  few  copies  of 
Erewhon,  but  then  it  was  such  a  very  strong  one  and  the 
anonymousness  of  the  book  stimulated  curiosity.  A  percep- 


1 62  The  Position 

tion  of  the  value  of  a  review,  whether  friendly  or  hostile,  is 
as  old  as  St.  Paul's  Epistle  to  the  Philippians.* 

Hoodwinking  the  Public 

Sincerity  or  honesty  is  a  low  and  very  rudimentary  form 
of  virtue  that  is  only  to  be  found  to  any  considerable  extent 
among  the  protozoa.  Compare,  for  example,  the  integrity, 
sincerity  and  absolute  refusal  either  to  deceive  or  be  deceived 
that  exists  in  the  germ-cells  of  any  individual,  with  the  in- 
stinctive aptitude  for  lying  that  is  to  be  observed  in  the  full- 
grown  man.  The  full-grown  man  is  compacted  of  lies  and 
shams  which  are  to  him  as  the  breath  of  his  nostrils.  Whereas 
the  germ-cells  will  not  be  humbugged ;  they  will  tell  the  truth 
as  near  as  they  can.  They  know  their  ancestors  meant  well 
and  will  tend  to  become  even  more  sincere  themselves. 

Thus,  if  a  painter  has  not  tried  hard  to  paint  well  and  has 
tried  hard  to  hoodwink  the  public,  his  offspring  is  not  likely 
to  show  hereditary  aptitude  for  painting,  but  is  likely  to 
have  an  improved  power  of  hoodwinking  the  public.  So  it 
is  with  music,  literature,  science  or  anything  else.  The  only 
thing  the  public  can  do  against  this  is  to  try  hard  to  develop 
a  hereditary  power  of  not  being  hoodwinked.  From  the  small 
success  it  has  met  with  hitherto  we  may  think  that  the  effort 
on  its  part  can  have  been  neither  severe  nor  long  sustained. 
Indeed,  all  ages  seem  to  have  held  that  "the  pleasure  is  as 
great  of  being  cheated  as  to  cheat." 

The  Public  Ear 

Those  who  have  squatted  upon  it  may  be  trusted  to  keep 
off  other  squatters  if  they  can.  The  public  ear  is  like  the  land 
which  looks  infinite  but  is  all  parcelled  out  into  fields  and 

*  Philippians  i.  15-18: — 

Some  indeed  preach  Christ  even  of  envy  and  strife ;  and  some  also 
of  good  will : 

The  one  preach  Christ  of  contention,  not  sincerely,  supposing  to 
add  affliction  to  my  bonds  : 

But  the  other  of  love,  knowing  that  I  am  set  for  the  defence  of  the 
gospel. 

What  then?  notwithstanding,  every  way,  whether  in  pretence,  or 
in  truth,  Christ  is  preached;  and  I  therein  do  rejoice,  yea,  and  will 
rejoice. 


of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri  163 

private  ownerships — barring,  of  course,  highways  and  com- 
mons. So  the  universe,  which  looks  so  big,  may  be  supposed 
as  really  all  parcelled  out  among  the  stars  that  stud  It. 

Or  the  public  ear  is  like  a  common;  there  is  not  much  to 
be  got  off  it,  but  that  little  is  for  the  most  part  grazed  down 
by  geese  and  donkeys. 

Those  who  wish  to  gain  the  public  ear  should  bear  in  mind 
that  people  do  not  generally  want  to  be  made  less  foolish  or 
less  wicked.  What  they  want  is  to  be  told  that  they  are  not 
foolish  and  not  wicked.  Now  it  is  only  a  fool  or  a  liar  or 
both  who  can  tell  them  this;  the  masses  therefore  cannot  be 
expected  to  like  any  but  fools  or  liars  or  both.  So  when  a 
lady  gets  photographed,  what  she  wants  is  not  to  be  made 
beautiful  but  to  be  told  that  she  is  beautiful. 

Secular  Thinking 

The  ages  do  their  thinking  much  as  the  individual  does. 
When  considering  a  difficult  question,  we  think  alternately 
for  several  seconds  together  of  details,  even  the  minutest 
seeming  important,  and  then  of  broad  general  principles, 
whereupon  even  large  details  become  unimportant ;  again  we 
have  bouts  during  which  rules,  logic  and  technicalities  en- 
gross us,  followed  by  others  in  which  the  unwritten  and  un- 
writable common  sense  of  grace  defies  and  over-rides  the  law. 
That  is  to  say,  we  have  our  inductive  fits  and  our  deductive 
fits,  our  arrangements  according  to  the  letter  and  according 
to  the  spirit,  our  conclusions  drawn  from  logic  secundum 
artem  and  from  absurdity  and  the  character  of  the  arguer. 
This  heterogeneous  mass  of  considerations  forms  the  mental 
pabulum  with  which  we  feed  our  minds.  How  that  pabulum 
becomes  amalgamated,  reduced  to  uniformity  and  turned  into 
the  growth  of  complete  opinion  we  can  no  more  tell  than  we 
can  say  when,  how  and  where  food  becomes  flesh  and  blood. 
All  we  can  say  is  that  the  miracle,  stupendous  as  it  is  and 
involving  the  stultification  of  every  intelligible  principle  on 
which  thought  and  action  are  based,  is  nevertheless  worked  a 
thousand  times  an  hour  by  every  one  of  us. 

The  formation  of  public  opinion  is  as  mysterious  as  that  of 
individual,  but,  so  far  as  we  can  form  any  opinion  about  that 
which  forms  our  opinions  in  such  large  measure,  the  pro- 


164  The  Position 

cesses  appear  to  resemble  one  another  much  as  rain  drops 
resemble  one  another.  There  is  essential  agreement  in 
spite  of  essential  difference.  So  that  here,  as  everywhere 
else,  we  no  sooner  scratch  the  soil  than  we  come  upon 
the  granite  of  contradiction  in  terms  and  can  scratch  no 
further. 

As  for  ourselves,  we  are  passing  through  an  inductive, 
technical,  speculative  period  and  have  gone  such  lengths  in 
this  direction  that  a  reaction,  during  which  we  shall  pass  to 
the  other  extreme,  may  be  confidently  predicted. 

The  Art  of  Propagating  Opinion 

He  who  would  propagate  an  opinion  must  begin  by  making 
sure  of  his  ground  and  holding  it  firmly.  There  is  as  little 
use  in  trying  to  breed  from  weak  opinion  as  from  other  weak 
stock,  animal  or  vegetable. 

The  more  securely  a  man  holds  an  opinion,  the  more  tem- 
perate he  can  afford  to  be,  and  the  more  temperate  he  is, 
the  more  weight  he  will  carry  with  those  who  are  in  the  long 
run  weightiest.  Ideas  and  opinions,  like  living  organisms, 
have  a  normal  rate  of  growth  which  cannot  be  either  checked 
or  forced  beyond  a  certain  point.  They  can  be  held  in  check 
more  safely  than  they  can  be  hurried.  They  can  also  be 
killed;  and  one  of  the  surest  ways  to  kill  them  is  to  try  to 
hurry  them. 

The  more  unpopular  an  opinion  is,  the  more  necessary  is 
it  that  the  holder  should  be  somewhat  punctilious  in  his  ob- 
servance of  conventionalities  generally,  and  that,  if  possible, 
he  should  get  the  reputation  of  being  well-to-do  in  the 
world. 

Arguments  are  not  so  good  as  assertion.  Arguments  are 
like  fire-arms  which  a  man  may  keep  at  home  but  should  not 
carry  about  with  him.  Indirect  assertion,  leaving  the  hearer 
to  point  the  inference,  is,  as  a  rule,  to  be  preferred.  The 
one  great  argument  with  most  people  is  that  another  should 
think  this  or  that.  The  reasons  of  the  belief  are  details  and, 
in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  best  omitted  as  confusing  and  weak- 
ening the  general  impression. 

Many,  if  not  most,  good  ideas  die  young — mainly  from 
neglect  on  the  part  of  the  parents,  but  sometimes  from  over- 


of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri  165 

fondness.    Once  well  started,  an  opinion  had  better  be  left 
to  shift  for  itself. 

Insist  as  far  as  possible  on  the  insignificance  of  the  points 
of  difference  as  compared  with  the  resemblances  to  opinions 
generally  accepted. 

Gladstone  as  a  Financier 

I  said  to  my  tobacconist  that  Gladstone  was  not  a  financier 
because  he  bought  a  lot  of  china  at  high  prices  and  it  fetched 
very  little  when  it  was  sold  at  Christie's. 

"Did  he  give  high  prices  ?"  said  the  tobacconist. 

"Enormous  prices,"  said  I  emphatically. 

Now,  to  tell  the  truth,  I  did  not  know  whether  Mr.  Glad- 
stone had  ever  bought  the  china  at  all,  much  less  what  he 
gave  for  it,  if  he  did;  he  may  have  had  it  all  left  him  for 
aught  I  knew.  But  I  was  going  to  appeal  to  my  tobacconist 
by  arguments  that  he  could  understand,  and  I  could  see  he 
was  much  impressed. 

Argument 

Argument  is  generally  waste  of  time  and  trouble.  It  is 
better  to  present  one's  opinion  and  leave  it  to  stick  or  no 
as  it  may  happen.  If  sound,  it  will  probably  in  the  end  stick, 
and  the  sticking  is  the  main  thing. 

Humour 

What  a  frightful  thing  it  would  be  if  true  humour  were 
more  common  or,  rather,  more  easy  to  see,  for  it  is  more 
common  than  those  are  who  can  see  it.  It  would  block  the 
way  of  everything.  Perhaps  this  is  what  people  rather  feel. 
It  would  be  like  Music  in  the  Ode  for  St.  Cecilia's  Day,  it 
would  "untune  the  sky." 

I  do  not  know  quite  what  is  meant  by  untuning  the  sky 
and,  if  I  did,  I  cannot  think  that  there  is  anything  to  be 
particularly  gained  by  having  the  sky  untuned;  still,  if  it 
has  got  to  be  untuned  at  all,  I  am  sure  music  is  the  only 
thing  that  can  untune  it.  Rapson,  however,  whom  I  used 
to  see  in  the  coin  room  at  the  British  Museum,  told  me  it 


1 66  The  Position 

should  be  "entune  the  sky"  and  it  sounds  as  though  he  were 
right. 

Myself  and  "Unconscious  Humour" 

The  phrase  "unconscious  humour"  is  the  one  contribution 
I  have  made  to  the  current  literature  of  the  day.  I  am  con- 
tinually seeing  unconscious  humour  (without  quotation 
marks)  alluded  to  in  Times  articles  and  other  like  places,  but 
I  never  remember  to  have  come  across  it  as  a  synonym  for 
dullness  till  I  wrote  Life  and  Habit. 

My  Humour 

The  thing  to  say  about  me  just  now  is  that  my  humour  is 
forced.  This  began  to  reach  me  in  connection  with  my  article 
"Quis  Desiderio  .  .  .  ?"  [Universal  Review,  1888]  and  is 
now,  [1889]  I  understand,  pretty  generally  perceived  even 
by  those  who  had  not  found  it  out  for  themselves. 

I  am  not  aware  of  forcing  myself  to  say  anything  which 
has  not  amused  me,  which  is  not  apposite  and  which  I  do  not 
believe  will  amuse  a  neutral  reader,  but  I  may  very  well  do 
so  without  knowing  it.  As  for  my  humour,  I  am  like  my 
father  and  grandfather,  both  of  whom  liked  a  good  thing 
heartily  enough  if  it  was  told  them,  but  I  do  not  often  say  a 
good  thing  myself.  Very  likely  my  humour,  what  little  there 
is  of  it,  is  forced  enough.  I  do  not  care  so  long  as  it  amuses 
me  and,  such  as  it  is,  I  shall  vent  it  in  my  own  way  and  at 
my  own  time. 

Myself  and  My  Publishers 

I  see  my  publishers  are  bringing  out  a  new  magazine  with 
all  the  usual  contributors.  Of  course  they  don't  ask  me  to 
write  and  this  shows  that  they  do  not  think  my  name  would 
help  their  magazine.  This,  I  imagine,  means  that  Andrew 
Lang  has  told  them  that  my  humour  is  forced.  I  should  not 
myself  say  that  Andrew  Lang's  humour  would  lose  by  a  little 
forcing. 

I  have  seen  enough  of  my  publishers  to  know  that  they  have 
no  ideas  of  their  own  about  literature  save  what  they  can 


of  a  Homo  Unius  Libri  167 

clutch  at  as  believing  it  to  be  a  straight  tip  from  a  business 
point  of  view.  Heaven  forbid  that  I  should  blame  them  for 
doing  exactly  what  I  should  do  myself  in  their  place,  but, 
things  being  as  they  are,  they  are  no  use  to  me.  They  have 
no  confidence  in  me  and  they  must  have  this  or  they  will  do 
nothing  for  me  beyond  keeping  my  books  on  their  shelves. 

Perhaps  it  is  better  that  I  should  not  have  a  chance  of  be- 
coming a  hack-writer,  for  I  should  grasp  it  at  once  if  it  were 
offered  me. 


XI 
Cash  and  Credit 


The  Unseen  World 

I  BELIEVE  there  is  an  unseen  world  about  which  we  know 
nothing  as  firmly  as  any  one  can  believe  it.  I  see  things 
coming  up  from  it  into  the  visible  world  and  going  down 
again  from  the  seen  world  to  the  unseen.  But  my  unseen 
world  is  to  be  bona  fide  unseen  and,  in  so  far  as  I  say  I  know 
anything  about  it,  I  stultify  myself.  It  should  no  more  be 
described  than  God  should  be  represented  in  painting  or 
sculpture.  It  is  as  the  other  side  of  the  moon;  we  know  it 
must  be  there  but  we  know  also  that,  in  the  nature  of  things, 
we  can  never  see  it.  Sometimes,  some  trifle  of  it  may  sway 
into  sight  and  out  again,  but  it  is  so  little  that  it  is  not  worth 
counting  as  having  been  seen. 

The  Kingdom  of  Heaven 

The  world  admits  that  there  is  another  world,  that  there 
is  a  kingdom,  veritable  and  worth  having,  which,  nevertheless, 
is  invisible  and  has  nothing  to  do  with  any  kingdom  such 
as  we  now  see.  It  agrees  that  the  wisdom  of  this  other 
kingdom  is  foolishness  here  on  earth,  while  the  wisdom  of 
the  world  is  foolishness  in  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  In  our 
hearts  we  know  that  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  the  higher  of 
the  two  and  the  better  worth  living  and  dying  for,  and  that, 
if  it  is  to  be  won,  it  must  be  sought  steadfastly  and  in  single- 
ness of  heart  by  those  who  put  all  else  on  one  side  and, 
shrinking  from  no  sacrifice,  are  ready  to  face  shame,  poverty 
and  torture  here  rather  than  abandon  the  hope  of  the  prize  of 

1 68 


Cash  and  Credit  169 

their  high  calling.    Nobody  who  doubts  any  of  this  is  worth 
talking  with. 

The  question  is,  where  is  this  Heavenly  Kingdom,  and 
what  way  are  we  to  take  to  find  it?  Happily  the  answer  is 
easy,  for  we  are  not  likely  to  go  wrong  if  in  all  simplicity, 
humility  and  good  faith  we  heartily  desire  to  find  it  and  fol- 
low the  dictates  of  ordinary  common-sense. 

The  Philosopher 

He  should  have  made  many  mistakes  and  been  saved  often 
by  the  skin  of  his  teeth,  for  the  skin  of  one's  teeth  is  the 
most  teaching  thing  about  one.  He  should  have  been,  or  at 
any  rate  believed  himself,  a  great  fool  and  a  great  criminal. 
He  should  have  cut  himself  adrift  from  society,  and  yet  not 
be  without  society.  He  should  have  given  up  all,  even 
Christ  himself,  for  Christ's  sake.  He  should  be  above  fear  or 
love  or  hate,  and  yet  know  them  extremely  well.  He  should 
have  lost  all  save  a  small  competence  and  know  what  a 
vantage  ground  it  is  to  be  an  outcast.  Destruction  and  Death 
say  they  have  heard  the  fame  of  wisdom  with  their  ears,  and 
the  philosopher  must  have  been  close  up  to  these  if  he  too 
would  hear  it. 

The  Artist  and  the  Shopkeeper 

Most  artists,  whether  in  religion,  music,  literature,  paint- 
ing, or  what  not,  are  shopkeepers  in  disguise.  They  hide 
their  shop  as  much  as  they  can,  and  keep  pretending  that 
it  does  not  exist,  but  they  are  essentially  shopkeepers  and 
nothing  else.  Why  do  I  try  to  sell  my  books  and  feel  regret 
at  never  seeing  them  pay  their  expenses  if  I  am  not  a  shop- 
keeper ?  Of  course  I  am,  only  I  keep  a  bad  shop — a  shop  that 
does  not  pay. 

In  like  manner,  the  professed  shopkeeper  has  generally  a 
taint  of  the  artist  somewhere  about  him  which  he  tries  to 
conceal  as  much  as  the  professed  artist  tries  to  conceal  his 
shopkeeping. 

The  business  man  and  the  arist  are  like  matter  and  mind. 
We  can  never  get  either  pure  and  without  some  alloy  of  the 
other. 


1 70  Cash  and  Credit 

Art  and  Trade 

People  confound  literature  and  article-dealing  because  the 
plant  in  both  cases  is  similar,  but  no  two  things  can  be 
more  distinct.  Neither  the  question  of  money  nor  that  of 
friend  or  foe  can  enter  into  literature  proper.  Here,  right 
feeling — or  good  taste,  if  this  expression  be  preferred — is 
alone  considered.  If  a  bona  fide  writer  thinks  a  thing  wants 
saying,  he  will  say  it  as  tersely,  clearly  and  elegantly  as  he 
can.  The  question  whether  it  will  do  him  personally  good  or 
harm,  or  how  it  will  affect  this  or  that  friend,  never  enters 
his  head,  or,  if  it  does,  it  is  instantly  ordered  out  again.  The 
only  personal  gratifications  allowed  him  (apart,  of  course, 
from  such  as  are  conceded  to  every  one,  writer  or  no)  are 
those  of  keeping  his  good  name  spotless  among  those  whose 
opinion  is  alone  worth  having  and  of  maintaining  the  highest 
traditions  of  a  noble  calling.  If  a  man  lives  in  fear  and 
trembling  lest  he  should  fail  in  these  respects,  if  he  finds  these 
considerations  alone  weigh  with  him,  if  he  never  writes  with- 
out thinking  how  he  shall  best  serve  good  causes  and  damage 
bad  ones,  then  he  is  a  genuine  man  of  letters.  If  in  addition 
to  this  he  succeeds  in  making  his  manner  attractive,  he  will 
become  a  classic.  He  knows  this.  He  knows,  although  the 
Greeks  in  their  mythology  forgot  to  say  so,  that  Conceit  was 
saved  to  mankind  as  well  as  Hope  when  Pandora  clapped  the 
lid  on  to  her  box. 

With  the  article-dealer,  on  the  other  hand,  money  is,  and 
ought  to  be,  the  first  consideration.  Literature  is  an  art; 
article-writing,  when  a  man  is  paid  for  it,  is  a  trade  and  none 
the  worse  for  that ;  but  pot-boilers  are  one  thing  and  genuine 
pictures  are  another.  People  have  indeed  been  paid  for 
some  of  the  most  genuine  pictures  ever  painted,  and  so  with 
music,  and  so  with  literature  itself — hard-and-fast  lines  ever 
cut  the  fingers  of  those  who  draw  them — but,  as  a  general 
rule,  most  lasting  art  has  been  poorly  paid,  so  far  as  money 
goes,  till  the  artist  was  near  the  end  of  his  time,  and,  whether 
money  passed  or  no,  we  may  be  sure  that  it  was  not  thought 
of.  Such  work  is  done  as  a  bird  sings — for  the  love  of  the 
thing;  it  is  persevered  in  as  long  as  body  and  soul  can  be 
kept  together,  whether  there  be  pay  or  no,  and  perhaps  better 
if  there  be  no  pay. 


Cash  and  Credit  171 

Nevertheless,  though  art  disregards  money  and  trade  dis- 
regards art,  the  artist  may  stand  not  a  little  trade-alloy  and 
be  even  toughened  by  it,  and  the  tradesmen  may  be  more 
than  half  an  artist.  Art  is  in  the  world  but  not  of  it;  it 
lives  in  a  kingdom  of  its  own,  governed  by  laws  that  none 
but  artists  can  understand.  This,  at  least,  is  the  ideal  to- 
wards which  an  artist  tends,  though  we  all  very  well  know 
we  none  of  us  reach  it.  With  the  trade  it  is  exactly  the 
reverse;  this  world  is,  and  ought  to  be,  everything,  and  the 
invisible  world  is  as  little  to  the  trade  as  this  visible  world  is 
to  the  artist. 

When  I  say  the  artist  tends  towards  such  a  world,  I  mean 
not  that  he  tends  consciously  and  reasoningly  but  that  his 
instinct  to  take  this  direction  will  be  too  strong  to  let  him 
take  any  other.  He  is  incapable  of  reasoning  on  the  subject ; 
if  he  could  reason  he  would  be  lost  qua  artist ;  for,  by  every 
test  that  reason  can  apply,  those  who  sell  themselves  for  a 
price  are  in  the  right.  The  artist  is  guided  by  a  faith  that 
for  him  transcends  all  reason.  Granted  that  this  faith  has 
been  in  great  measure  founded  on  reason,  that  it  has  grown 
up  along  with  reason,  that  if  it  lose  touch  with  reason  it  is  no 
longer  faith  but  madness;  granted,  again,  that  reason  is  in 
great  measure  founded  on  faith,  that  it  has  grown  up  along 
with  faith,  that  if  it  lose  touch  with  faith  it  is  no  longer 
reason  but  mechanism;  granted,  therefore,  that  faith  grows 
with  reason  as  will  with  power,  as  demand  with  supply,  as 
mind  with  body,  each  stimulating  and  augmenting  the  other 
until  an  invisible,  minute  nucleus  attains  colossal  growth — 
nevertheless  the  difference  between  the  man  of  the  world  and 
the  man  who  lives  by  faith  is  that  the  first  is  drawn  towards 
the  one  and  the  second  towards  the  other  of  two  principles 
which,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  are  co-extensive  and  co-equal  in 
importance. 

Money 

It  is  curious  that  money,  which  is  the  most  valuable  thing 
in  life,  exceptis  excipiendis,  should  be  the  most  fatal  corrupter 
of  music,  literature,  painting  and  all  the  arts.  As  soon  as 
any  art  is  pursued  with  a  view  to  money,  then  farewell,  in 
ninety-nine  cases  out  of  a  hundred,  all  hope  of  genuine  good 


172  Cash  and  Credit 

work.  If  a  man  has  money  at  his  back,  he  may  touch  these 
things  and  do  something  which  will  live  a  long  while,  and  he 
may  be  very  happy  in  doing  it;  if  he  has  no  money,  he  may 
do  good  work,  but  the  chances  are  he  will  be  killed  in  doing 
it  and  for  having  done  it ;  or  he  may  make  himself  happy 
by  doing  bad  work  and  getting  money  out  of  it,  and  there  is 
no  great  harm  in  this,  provided  he  knows  his  work  is  done  in 
this  spirit  and  rates  it  for  its  commercial  value  only.  Still, 
as  a  rule,  a  man  should  not  touch  any  of  the  arts  as  a  creator 
unless  he  has  a  discreta  posizionina  behind  him. 

Modern  Simony 

It  is  not  the  dealing  in  livings  but  the  thinking  they  can  buy 
the  Holy  Ghost  for  money  which  vulgar  rich  people  indulge 
in  when  they  dabble  in  literature,  music  and  painting. 

Nevertheless,  on  reflection  it  must  be  admitted  that  the 
Holy  Ghost  is  very  hard  to  come  by  without  money.  For  the 
Holy  Ghost  is  only  another  term  for  the  Fear  of  the  Lord, 
which  is  Wisdom.  And  though  Wisdom  cannot  be  gotten  for 
gold,  still  less  can  it  be  gotten  without  it.  Gold,  or  the  value 
that  is  equivalent  to  gold,  lies  at  the  root  of  Wisdom,  and 
enters  so  largely  into  the  very  essence  of  the  Holy  Ghost 
that  "No  gold,  no  Holy  Ghost"  may  pass  as  an  axiom.  This 
is  perhaps  why  it  is  not  easy  to  buy  Wisdom  by  whatever 
name  it  be  called — I  mean,  because  it  is  almost  impossible 
to  sell  it.  It  is  a  very  unmarketable  commodity,  as  those 
who  have  received  it  truly  know  to  their  own  great  bane  and 
boon. 

My  Grandfather  and  Myself 

My  grandfather  worked  very  hard  all  his  life,  and  was 
making  money  all  the  time  until  he  became  a  bishop.  I  have 
worked  very  hard  all  my  life,  but  have  never  been  able  to 
earn  money.  As  usefulness  is  generally  counted,  no  one  can 
be  more  useless.  This  I  believe  to  be  largely  due  to  the 
public-school  and  university  teaching  through  which  my 
grandfather  made  his  money.  Yes,  but  then  if  he  is  largely 
responsible  for  that  which  has  made  me  useless,  has  he  not 
also  left  me  the  hardly-won  money  which  makes  my  useless- 


Cash  and  Credit  173 

ness  sufficiently  agreeable  to  myself?  And  would  not  the 
poor  old  gentleman  gladly  change  lots  with  me,  if  he  could? 
I  do  not  know;  but  I  should  be  sorry  to  change  lots  with 
him  or  with  any  one  else,  so  I  need  not  grumble.  I  said  in 
Luck  or  Cunning?  that  the  only  way  (at  least  I  think  I  said 
so)  in  which  a  teacher  can  thoroughly  imbue  an  unwilling 
learner  with  his  own  opinions  is  for  the  teacher  to  eat  the 
pupil  up  and  thus  assimilate  him — if  he  can,  for  it  is  possible 
that  the  pupil  may  continue  to  disagree  with  the  teacher. 
And  as  a  matter  of  fact,  school-masters  do  live  upon  their 
pupils,  and  I,  as  my  grandfather's  grandson,  continue  to  bat- 
ten upon  old  pupil. 

Art  and  Usefulness 

Tedder,  the  Librarian  of  the  Athenaeum,  said  to  me  when 
I  told  him  (I  have  only  seen  him  twice)  what  poor  success 
my  books  had  met  with : 

"Yes,  but  you  have  made  the  great  mistake  of  being  use- 
ful." 

This,  for  the  moment,  displeased  me,  for  I  know  that  I 
have  always  tried  to  make  my  work  useful  and  should  not 
care  about  doing  it  at  all  unless  I  believed  it  to  subserve  use 
more  or  less  directly.  Yet  when  I  look  at  those  works  which 
we  all  hold  to  be  the  crowning  glories  of  the  world  as,  for 
example,  the  Iliad,  the  Odyssey,  Hamlet,  the  Messiah, 
Rembrandt's  portraits,  or  Holbein's,  or  Giovanni  Bellini's, 
the  connection  between  them  and  use  is,  to  say  the  least  of 
it,  far  from  obvious.  Music,  indeed,  can  hardly  be  tortured 
into  being  useful  at  all,  unless  to  drown  the  cries  of  the 
wounded  in  battle,  or  to  enable  people  to  talk  more  freely  at 
evening  parties.  The  uses,  again,  of  painting  in  its  highest 
forms  are  very  doubtful — I  mean  in  any  material  sense;  in 
its  lower  forms,  when  it  becomes  more  diagrammatic,  it  is 
materially  useful.  Literature  may  be  useful  from  its  lowest 
forms  to  nearly  its  highest,  but  the  highest  cannot  be  put  in 
harness  to  any  but  spiritual  uses;  and  the  fact  remains  that 
the  "Hallelujah  Chorus,"  the  speech  of  Hamlet  to  the  players, 
Bellini's  "Doge"  have  their  only  uses  in  a  spiritual  world 
whereto  the  word  "uses"  is  as  alien  as  bodily  flesh  is  to  a  choir 
of  angels.  As  it  is  fatal  to  the  highest  art  that  it  should  have 


174  Cash  and  Credit 

been  done  for  money,  so  it  seems  hardly  less  fatal  that  it 
should  be  done  with  a  view  to  those  uses  that  tend  towards 
money. 

And  yet,  was  not  the  Iliad  written  mainly  with  a  view  to 
money?  Did  not  Shakespeare  make  money  by  his  plays, 
Handel  by  his  music,  and  the  noblest  painters  by  their  art? 
True ;  but  in  all  these  cases,  I  take  it,  love  of  fame  and  that 
most  potent  and,  at  the  same  time,  unpractical  form  of  it, 
the  lust  after  fame  beyond  the  grave,  was  the  mainspring  of 
the  action,  the  money  being  but  a  concomitant  accident. 
Money  is  like  the  wind  that  bloweth  whithersoever  it  listeth, 
sometimes  it  chooses  to  attach  itself  to  high  feats  of  litera- 
ture and  art  and  music,  but  more  commonly  it  prefers  lower 
company.  .  .  . 

I  can  continue  this  note  no  further,  for  there  is  no  end  to 
it.  Briefly,  the  world  resolves  itself  into  two  great  classes — 
those  who  hold  that  honour  after  death  is  better  worth  hav- 
ing than  any  honour  a  man  can  get  and  know  anything  about, 
and  those  who  doubt  this;  to  my  mind,  those  who  hold  it, 
and  hold  it  firmly,  are  the  only  people  worth  thinking  about. 
They  will  also  hold  that,  important  as  the  physical  world 
obviously  is,  the  spiritual  world,  of  which  we  know  little 
beyond  its  bare  existence,  is  more  important  still. 

Genius 


Genius  is  akin  both  to  madness  and  inspiration  and,  as 
every  one  is  both  more  or  less  inspired  and  more  or  less  mad, 
every  one  has  more  or  less  genius.  When,  therefore,  we 
speak  of  genius  we  do  not  mean  an  absolute  thing  which 
some  men  have  and  others  have  not,  but  a  small  scale- 
turning  overweight  of  a  something  which  we  all  have  but 
which  we  cannot  either  define  or  apprehend — the  quantum 
which  we  all  have  being  allowed  to  go  without  saying. 

This  small  excess  weight  has  been  defined  as  a  supreme 
capacity  for  taking  trouble,  but  he  who  thus  defined  it  can 
hardly  claim  genius  in  respect  of  his  own  definition — his 
capacity  for  taking  trouble  does  not  seem  to  have  been  ab- 
normal. It  might  be  more  fitly  described  as  a  supreme  ca- 
pacity for  getting  its  possessors  into  trouble  of  all  kinds  and 


Cash  and  Credit  175 

keeping  them  therein  so  long  as  the  genius  remains.  Peo- 
ple who  are  credited  with  genius  have,  indeed,  been  some- 
times very  painstaking,  but  they  would  often  show  more 
signs  of  genius  if  they  had  taken  less.  "You  have  taken 
too  much  trouble  with  your  opera,"  said  Handel  to  Gluck. 
It  is  not  likely  that  the  "Hailstone  Chorus"  or  Mrs.  Quickly 
cost  their  creators  much  pains,  indeed,  we  commonly  feel 
the  ease  with  which  a  difficult  feat  has  been  performed  to 
be  a  more  distinctive  mark  of  genius  than  the  fact  that  the 
performer  took  great  pains  before  he  could  achieve  it.  Pains 
can  serve  genius,  or  even  mar  it,  but  they  cannot  make  it. 

We  can  rarely,  however,  say  what  pains  have  or  have  not 
been  taken  in  any  particular  case,  for,  over  and  above  the 
spent  pains  of  a  man's  early  efforts,  the  force  of  which  may 
carry  him  far  beyond  all  trace  of  themselves,  there  are  the 
still  more  remote  and  invisible  ancestral  pains,  repeated  we 
know  not  how  often  or  in  what  fortunate  correlation  with 
pains  taken  in  some  other  and  unseen  direction.  This  points 
to  the  conclusion  that,  though  it  is  wrong  to  suppose  the 
essence  of  genius  to  lie  in  a  capacity  for  taking  pains,  it  is 
right  to  hold  that  it  must  have  been  rooted  in  pains  and  that 
it  cannot  have  grown  up  without  them. 

Genius,  again,  might,  perhaps  almost  as  well,  be  defined 
as  a  supreme  capacity  for  saving  other  people  from  having 
to  take  pains,  if  the  highest  flights  of  genius  did  not  seem 
to  know  nothing  about  pains  one  way  or  the  other.  What 
trouble  can  Hamlet  or  the  Iliad  save  to  any  one?  Genius 
can,  and  does,  save  it  sometimes ;  the  genius  of  Newton  may 
have  saved  a  good  deal  of  trouble  one  way  or  another,  but  it 
has  probably  engendered  as  much  new  as  it  has  saved  old. 

This,  however,  is  all  a  matter  of  chance,  for  genius  never 
seems  to  care  whether  it  makes  the  burden  or  bears  it.  The 
only  certain  thing  is  that  there  will  be  a  burden,  for  the 
Holy  Ghost  has  ever  tended  towards  a  breach  of  the  peace, 
and  the  New  Jerusalem,  when  it  comes,  will  probably  be 
found  so  far  to  resemble  the  old  as  to  stone  its  prophets 
freely.  The  world  thy  world  is  a  jealous  world,  and  thou 
shalt  have  none  other  worlds  but  it.  Genius  points  to  change, 
and  change  is  a  hankering  after  another  world,  so  the  old 
world  suspects  it.  Genius  disturbs  order,  it  unsettles  mores 
and  hence  it  is  immoral.  On  a  small  scale  it  is  intolerable, 


176  Cash  and  Credit 

but  genius  will  have  no  small  scales ;  it  is  even  more  immoral 
for  a  man  to  be  too  far  in  front  than  to  lag  too  far  behind. 
The  only  absolute  morality  is  absolute  stagnation,  but  this 
is  unpractical,  so  a  peck  of  change  is  permitted  to  every  one, 
but  it  must  be  a  peck  only,  whereas  genius  would  have  ever 
so  many  sacks  full.  There  is  a  myth  among  some  Eastern 
nation  that  at  the  birth  of  Genius  an  unkind  fairy  marred 
all  the  good  gifts  of  the  other  fairies  by  depriving  it  of  the 
power  of  knowing  where  to  stop. 

Nor  does  genius  care  more  about  money  than  about  trouble. 
It  is  no  respecter  of  time,  trouble,  money  or  persons,  the 
four  things  round  which  human  affairs  turn  most  persistently. 
It  will  not  go  a  hair's  breadth  from  its  way  either  to  embrace 
fortune  or  to  avoid  her.  It  is,  like  Love,  "too  young  to 
know  the  worth  of  gold."  *  It  knows,  indeed,  both  love  and 
hate,  but  not  as  we  know  them,  for  it  will  fly  for  help  to 
its  bitterest  foe,  or  attack  its  dearest  friend  in  the  interests 
of  the  art  it  serves. 

Yet  this  genius,  which  so  despises  the  world,  is  the  only 
thing  of  which  the  world  is  permanently  enamoured,  and  the 
more  it  flouts  the  world,  the  more  the  world  worships  it, 
when  it  has  once  well  killed  it  in  the  flesh.  Who  can  under- 
stand this  eternal  crossing  in  love  and  contradiction  in  terms 
which  warps  the  woof  of  actions  and  things  from  the  atom 
to  the  universe?  The  more  a  man  despises  time,  trouble, 
money,  persons,  place  and  everything  on  which  the  world 
insists  as  most  essential  to  salvation,  the  more  pious  will 
this  same  world  hold  him  to  have  been.  What  a  fund  of 
universal  unconscious  scepticism  must  underlie  the  world's 
opinions !  For  we  are  all  alike  in  our  worship  of  genius  that 
has  passed  through  the  fire.  Nor  can  this  universal  instinctive 
consent  be  explained  otherwise  than  as  the  welling  up  of  a 
spring  whose  sources  lie  deep  in  the  conviction  that  great 
as  this  world  is,  it  masks  a  greater  wherein  its  wisdom  is 
folly  and  which  we  know  as  blind  men  know  where  the  sun 
is  shining,  certainly,  but  not  distinctly. 

This  should  in  itself  be  enough  to  prove  that  such  a  world 
exists,  but  there  is  still  another  proof  in  the  fact  that  so  many 
come  among  us  showing  instinctive  and  ineradicable  famil- 
iarity with  a  state  of  things  which  has  no  counterpart  here, 

*  Narcissus,  "Should  Riches  mate  with  Love." 


Cash  and  Credit  177 

and  cannot,  therefore,  have  been  acquired  here.  From  such 
a  world  we  come,  every  one  of  us,  but  some  seem  to  have  a 
more  living  recollection  of  it  than  others.  Perfect  recollection 
of  it  no  man  can  have,  for  to  put  on  flesh  is  to  have  all  one's 
other  memories  jarred  beyond  power  of  conscious  recognition. 
And  genius  must  put  on  flesh,  for  it  is  only  by  the  hook  and 
crook  of  taint  and  flesh  that  tainted  beings  like  ourselves 
can  apprehend  it,  only  in  and  through  flesh  can  it  be  made 
manifest  to  us  at  all.  The  flesh  and  the  shop  will  return 
no  matter  with  how  many  pitchforks  we  expel  them,  for  we 
cannot  conceivably  expel  them  thoroughly;  therefore  it  is 
better  not  to  be  too  hard  upon  them.  And  yet  this  same 
flesh  cloaks  genius  at  the  very  time  that  it  reveals  it.  It 
seems  as  though  the  flesh  must  have  been  on  and  must  have 
gone  clean  off  before  genius  can  be  discerned,  and  also  that 
we  must  stand  a  long  way  from  it,  for  the  world  grows  more 
and  more  myopic  as  it  grows  older.  And  this  brings  another 
trouble,  for  by  the  time  the  flesh  has  gone  off  it  enough,  and  it 
is  far  enough  away  for  us  to  see  it  without  glasses,  the  chances 
are  we  shall  have  forgotten  its  very  existence  and  lose  the 
wish  to  see  at  the  very  moment  of  becoming  able  to  do  so. 
Hence  there  appears  to  be  no  remedy  for  the  oft-repeated 
complaint  that  the  world  knows  nothing  of  its  greatest  men. 
How  can  it  be  expected  to  do  so  ?  And  how  can  its  greatest 
men  be  expected  to  know  more  than  a  very  little  of  the  world  ? 
At  any  rate,  they  seldom  do,  and  it  is  just  because  they  cannot 
and  do  not  that,  if  they  ever  happen  to  be  found  out  at  all, 
they  are  recognised  as  the  greatest  and  the  world  weeps  and 
wrings  its  hands  that  it  cannot  know  more  about  them. 

Lastly,  if  genius  cannot  be  bought  with  money,  still  less 
can  it  sell  what  it  produces.  The  only  price  that  can  be  paid 
for  genius  is  suffering,  and  this  is  the  only  wages  it  can  re- 
ceive. The  only  work  that  has  any  considerable  permanence 
is  written,  more  or  less  consciously,  in  the  blood  of  the  writer, 
or  in  that  of  his  or  her  forefathers.  Genius  is  like  money, 
or,  again,  like  crime,  every  one  has  a  little,  if  it  be  only  a  half- 
penny, and  he  can  beg  or  steal  this  much  if  he  has  not  got  it ; 
but  those  who  have  little  are  rarely  very  fond  of  millionaires. 
People  generally  like  and  understand  best  those  who  are 
of  much  about  the  same  social  standing  and  money  status 
as  their  own ;  and  so  it  is  for  the  most  part  as  between  those 


17$  Cash  and  Credit 

who  have  only  the  average  amount  of  genius  and  the  Homers, 
Shakespeares  and  Handels  of  the  race. 

And  yet,  so  paradoxical  is  everything  connected  with 
genius,  that  it  almost  seems  as  though  the  nearer  people  stood 
to  one  another  in  respect  either  of  money  or  genius,  the  more 
jealous  they  become  of  one  another.  I  have  read  somewhere 
that  Thackeray  was  one  day  flattening  his  nose  against  a 
grocer's  window  and  saw  two  bags  of  sugar,  one  marked 
tenpence  halfpenny  and  the  other  elevenpence  (for  sugar 
has  come  down  since  Thackeray's  time).  As  he  left  the  win- 
dow he  was  heard  to  say,  "How  they  must  hate  one  another !" 
So  it  is  in  the  animal  and  vegetable  worlds.  The  war  of 
extermination  is  generally  fiercest  between  the  most  nearly 
allied  species,  for  these  stand  most  in  one  another's  light. 
So  here  again  the  same  old  paradox  and  contradiction  in 
terms  meets  us,  like  a  stone  wall,  in  the  fact  that  we  love 
best  those  who  are  in  the  main  like  ourselves,  but  when  they 
get  too  like,  we  hate  them,  and,  at  the  same  time,  we  hate 
most  those  who  are  unlike  ourselves,  but  if  they  become  un- 
like enough,  we  may  often  be  very  fond  of  them. 

Genius  must  make  those  that  have  it  think  apart,  and  to 
think  apart  is  to  take  one's  view  of  things  instead  of  being, 
like  Poins,  a  blessed  fellow  to  think  as  every  man  thinks. 
A  man  who  thinks  for  himself  knows  what  others  do  not, 
but  does  not  know  what  others  know.  Hence  the  belli  causa, 
for  he  cannot  serve  two  masters,  the  God  of  his  own  inward 
light  and  the  Mammon  of  common  sense,  at  one  and  the  same 
time.  How  can  a  man  think  apart  and  not  apart?  But  if 
he  is  a  genius  this  is  the  riddle  he  must  solve.  The  uncommon 
sense  of  genius  and  the  common  sense  of  the  rest  of  the  world 
are  thus  as  husband  and  wife  to  one  another ;  they  are  always 
quarrelling,  and  common  sense,  who  must  be  taken  to  be 
the  husband,  always  fancies  himself  the  master — nevertheless 
genius  is  generally  admitted  to  be  the  better  half. 

He  who  would  know  more  of  genius  must  turn  to  what 
he  can  find  in  the  poets,  or  to  whatever  other  sources  he  may 
discover,  for  I  can  help  him  no  further. 

ii 

The  destruction  of  great  works  of  literature  and  art  is  as 
necessary  for  the  continued  development  of  either  one  or 


Cash  and  Credit  179 

the  other  as  death  is  for  that  of  organic  life.  We  fight 
against  it  as  long  as  we  can,  and  often  stave  it  off  success- 
fully both  for  ourselves  and  others,  but  there  is  nothing  so 
great — not  Homer,  Shakespeare,  Handel,  Rembrandt,  Gio- 
vanni Bellini,  De  Hooghe,  Velasquez  and  the  goodly  com- 
pany of  other  great  men  for  whose  lives  we  would  gladly 
give  our  own — but  it  has  got  to  go  sooner  or  later  and  leave 
no  visible  traces,  though  the  invisible  ones  endure  from  ever- 
lasting to  everlasting.  It  is  idle  to  regret  this  for  ourselves 
or  others,  our  effort  should  tend  towards  enjoying  and  being 
enjoyed  as  highly  and  for  as  long  time  as  we  can,  and  then 
chancing  the  rest. 

iii 

Inspiration  is  never  genuine  if  it  is  known  as  inspiration 
at  the  time.  True  inspiration  always  steals  on  a  person;  its 
importance  not  being  fully  recognised  for  some  time.  So 
men  of  genius  always  escape  their  own  immediate  belongings, 
and  indeed  generally  their  own  age. 

iv 

Dullness  is  so  much  stronger  than  genius  because  there  is 
so  much  more  of  it,  and  it  is  better  organised  and  more  natu- 
rally cohesive  inter  se.  So  the  arctic  volcano  can  do  nothing 
against  arctic  ice. 

v 

America  will  have  her  geniuses,  as  every  other  country 
has,  in  fact  she  has  already  had  one  in  Walt  Whitman,  but 
I  do  not  think  America  is  a  good  place  in  which  to  be  a  genius. 
A  genius  can  never  expect  to  have  a  good  time  anywhere,  if 
he  is  a  genuine  article,  but  America  is  about  the  last  place 
in  which  life  will  be  endurable  at  all  for  an  inspired  writer  of 
any  kind. 

Great  Things 

All  men  can  do  great  things,  if  they  know  what  great 
things  are.  So  hard  is  this  last  that  even  where  it  exists  the 
knowledge  is  as  much  unknown  as  known  to  them  that  have  it 
and  is  more  a  leaning  upon  the  Lord  than  a  willing  of  one 
that  willeth.  And  yet  all  the  leaning  on  the  Lord  in  Christen- 
dom fails  if  there  be  not  a  will  of  him  that  willeth  to  back  it 
up.  God  and  the  man  are  powerless  without  one  another. 


180  Cash  and  Credit 


Genius  and  Providence 

Among  all  the  evidences  for  the  existence  of  an  overruling 
Providence  that  I  can  discover,  I  see  none  more  convincing 
than  the  elaborate  and  for  the  most  part  effectual  provision 
that  has  been  made  for  the  suppression  of  genius.  The  more 
I  see  of  the  world,  the  more  necessary  I  see  it  to  be  that  by 
far  the  greater  part  of  what  is  written  or  done  should  be  of 
so  fleeting  a  character  as  to  take  itself  away  quickly.  That 
is  the  advantage  in  the  fact  that  so  much  of  our  literature 
is  journalism. 

Schools  and  colleges  are  not  intended  to  foster  genius  and 
to  bring  it  out.  Genius  is  a  nuisance,  and  it  is  the  duty  of 
schools  and  colleges  to  abate  it  by  setting  genius-traps  in  its 
way.  They  are  as  the  artificial  obstructions  in  a  hurdle  race — 
tests  of  skill  and  endurance,  but  in  themselves  useless.  Still, 
so  necessary  is  it  that  genius  and  originality  should  be  abated 
that,  did  not  academies  exist,  we  should  have  had  to  invent 
them. 

The  Art  of  Covery 

This  is  as  important  and  interesting  as  Dis-covery.  Surely 
the  glory  of  finally  getting  rid  of  and  burying  a  long  and 
troublesome  matter  should  be  as  great  as  that  of  making  an 
important  discovery.  The  trouble  is  that  the  coverer  is  like 
Samson-  who  perished  in  the  wreck  of  what  he  had  destroyed ; 
if  he  gets  rid  of  a  thing  effectually  he  gets  rid  of  himself  too. 

Wanted 

We  want  a  Society  for  the  Suppression  of  Erudite  Re- 
search and  the  Decent  Burial  of  the  Past.  The  ghosts  of  the 
dead  past  want  quite  as  much  laying  as  raising. 

Ephemeral  and  Permanent  Success 

The  supposition  that  the  world  is  ever  in  league  to  put 
a  man  down  is  childish.  Hardly  less  childish  is  it  for  an 
author  to  lay  the  blame  on  reviewers.  A  good  sturdy  author 


Cash  and  Credit  181 

•is  a  match  for  a  hundred  reviewers.  He,  I  grant,  knows 
nothing  of  either  literature  or  science  who  does  not  know 
that  a  mot  d'ordre  given  by  a  few  wire-pullers  can,  for  a  time, 
make  or  mar  any  man's  success.  People  neither  know  what 
it  is  they  like  nor  do  they  want  to  find  out,  all  they  care 
about  is  the  being  supposed  to  derive  their  likings  from  the 
best  West-end  magazines,  so  they  look  to  the  shop  with 
the  largest  plate-glass  windows  and  take  what  the  shopman 
gives  them.  But  no  amount  of  plate-glass  can  carry  off  more 
than  a  certain  amount  of  false  pretences,  and  there  is  no 
mot  d'ordre  that  can  keep  a  man  permanently  down  if  he 
is  as  intent  on  winning  lasting  good  name  as  I  have  been. 
If  I  had  played  for  immediate  popularity  I  think  I  could 
have  won  it.  Having  played  for  lasting  credit  I  doubt  not 
that  it  will  in  the  end  be  given  me.  A  man  should  not  be 
held  to  be  ill-used  for  not  getting  what  he  has  not  played 
for.  I  am  not  saying  that  it  is  better  or  more  honourable  to 
play  for  lasting  than  for  immediate  success.  I  know  which  I 
myself  find  pleasanter,  but  that  has  nothing  to  do  with  it. 

It  is  a  nice  question  whether  the  light  or  the  heavy  armed 
soldier  of  literature  and  art  is  the  more  useful.  I  joined  the 
plodders  and  have  aimed  at  permanent  good  name  rather 
than  brilliancy.  I  have  no  doubt  I  did  this  because  instinct 
told  me  (for  I  never  thought  about  it)  that  this  would  be  the 
easier  and  less  thorny  path.  I  have  more  of  perseverance 
than  of  those,  perhaps,  even  more  valuable  gifts — facility 
and  readiness  of  resource.  I  hate  being  hurried.  Moreover 
I  am  too  fond  of  independence  to  get  on  with  the  leaders 
of  literature  and  science.  Independence  is  essential  for  per- 
manent but  fatal  to  immediate  success.  Besides,  luck  enters 
much  more  into  ephemeral  than  into  permanent  success  and 
I  have  always  distrusted  luck.  Those  who  play  a  waiting 
game  have  matters  more  in  their  own  hands,  time  gives  them 
double  chances ;  whereas  if  success  does  not  come  at  once  to 
the  ephemerid  he  misses  it  altogether. 

I  know  that  the  ordinary  reviewer  who  either  snarls  at  my 
work  or  misrepresents  it  or  ignores  it  or,  again,  who  pats  it 
sub-contemptuously  on  the  back  is  as  honourably  and  usefully 
employed  as  I  am.  In  the  kingdom  of  literature  (as  I  have 
just  been  saying  in  the  Universal  Review  about  Science) 
there  are  many  mansions  and  what  is  intolerable  in  one  is 


1 82  Cash  and  Credit 

common  form  in  another.  It  is  a  case  of  the  division  of 
labour  and  a  man  will  gravitate  towards  one  class  of  workers 
or  another  according  as  he  is  built.  There  is  neither  higher 
nor  lower  about  it. 

I  should  like  to  put  it  on  record  that  I  understand  it  and 
am  not  inclined  to  regret  the  arrangements  that  have  made 
me  possible. 

My  Birthright 

I  had  to  steal  my  own  birthright.  I  stole  it  and  was  bitterly 
punished.  But  I  saved  my  soul  alive. 


XII 
The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 


Myself 

I  AM  the  enfant  terrible  of  literature  and  science.  If  I  can- 
not, and  I  know  I  cannot,  get  the  literary  and  scientific  big- 
wigs to  give  me  a  shilling,  I  can,  and  I  know  I  can,  heave 
bricks  into  the  middle  of  them. 

Blake,  Dante,  Virgil  and  Tennyson 

Talking  it  over,  we  agreed  that  Blake  was  no  good  because 
he  learnt  Italian  at  60  in  order  to  study  Dante,  and  we  knew 
Dante  was  no  good  because  he  was  so  fond  of  Virgil,  and 
Virgil  was  no  good  because  Tennyson  ran  him,  and  as  for 
Tennyson — well,  Tennyson  goes  without  saying. 

My  Father  and  Shakespeare 

My  father  is  one  of  the  few  men  I  know  who  say  they  do 
not  like  Shakespeare.  I  could  forgive  my  father  for  not 
liking  Shakespeare  if  it  was  only  because  Shakespeare  wrote 
poetry;  but  this  is  not  the  reason.  He  dislikes  Shakespeare 
because  he  finds  him  so  very  coarse.  He  also  says  he  likes 
Tennyson  and  this  seriously  aggravates  his  offence. 

Tennyson 

We  were  saying  what  a  delightful  dispensation  of  provi- 
dence it  was  that  prosperous  people  will  write  their  memoirs. 
We  hoped  Tennyson  was  writing  his.  [1890.] 

P.S. — We  think  his  son  has  done  nearly  as  well.  [1898.] 

183 


184    The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

Walter  Pater  and  Matthew  Arnold 

Mr.  Walter  Pater's  style  is,  to  me,  like  the  face  of  some 
old  woman  who  has  been  to  Madame  Rachel  and  had  herself 
enamelled.  The  bloom  is  nothing  but  powder  and  paint  and 
the  odour  is  cherry-blossom.  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold's  odour  is 
as  the  faint  sickliness  of  hawthorn. 

My  Random  Passages 

At  the  Century  Club  a  friend  very  kindly  and  hesitatingly 
ventured  to  suggest  to  me  that  I  should  get  some  one  to  go 
over  my  MS.  before  printing;  a  judicious  editor,  he  said, 
would  have  prevented  me  from  printing  many  a  bit  which,  it 
seemed  to  him,  was  written  too  recklessly  and  offhand.  The 
fact  is  that  the  more  reckless  and  random  a  passage  appears 
to  be,  the  more  carefully  it  has  been  submitted  to  friends  and 
considered  and  re-considered ;  without  the  support  of  friends 
I  should  never  have  dared  to  print  one  half  of  what  I  have 
printed. 

I  am  not  one  of  those  who  can  repeat  the  General  Con- 
fession unreservedly.  I  should  say  rather : 

"I  have  left  unsaid  much  that  I  am  sorry  I  did  not  say,  but 
I  have  said  little  that  I  am  sorry  for  having  said,  and  I  am 
pretty  well  on  the  whole,  thank  you." 

Moral  Try- Your- Strengths 

There  are  people  who,  if  they  only  had  a  slot,  might  turn 
a  pretty  penny  as  moral  try-your-strengths,  like  those  we  see 
in  railway-stations  for  telling  people  their  physical  strength 
when  they  have  dropped  a  penny  in  the  slot.  In  a  way  they 
have  a  slot,  which  is  their  mouths,  and  people  drop  pennies 
in  by  asking  them  to  dinner,  and  then  they  try  their  strength 
against  them  and  get  snubbed;  but  this  way  is  roundabout 
and  expensive.  We  want  a  good  automatic  asinometer  by 
which  we  can  tell  at  a  moderate  cost  how  great  or  how  little 
of  a  fool  we  are. 

Populus  Vult 

If  people  like  being  deceived — and  this  can  hardly  be 
doubted — there  can  rarely  have  been  a  time  during  which 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     185 

they  can  have  had  more  of  the  wish  than  now.  The  literary, 
scientific  and  religious  worlds  vie  with  one  another  in  trying 
to  gratify  the  public. 

Men  and  Monkeys 

In  his  latest  article  (Feb.  1892)  Prof.  Garner  says  that  the 
chatter  of  monkeys  is  not  meaningless,  but  that  they  are  con- 
veying ideas  to  one  another.  This  seems  to  me  hazardous. 
The  monkeys  might  with  equal  justice  conclude  that  in  our 
magazine  articles,  or  literary  and  artistic  criticisms,  we  are 
not  chattering  idly  but  are  conveying  ideas  to  one  another. 

"One  Touch  of  Nature" 

"One  touch  of  nature  makes  the  whole  world  kin."  Should 
it  not  be  "marks,"  not  "makes"?  There  is  one  touch  of  na- 
ture, or  natural  feature,  which  marks  all  mankind  as  of  one 
family. 

P.S. — Surely  it  should  be  "of  ill-nature."  "One  touch  of 
ill-nature  marks — or  several  touches  of  ill-nature  mark  the 
whole  world  kin." 

Genuine  Feeling 

In  the  Times  of  to-day,  June  4,  1887,  there  is  an  obituary 
notice  of  a  Rev.  Mr.  Knight  who  wrote  about  200  songs, 
among  others  "She  wore  a  wreath  of  roses."  The  Times 
says  that,  though  these  songs  have  no  artistic  merit,  they 
are  full  of  genuine  feeling,  or  words  to  this  effect ;  as  though 
a  song  which  was  full  of  genuine  feeling  could  by  any  possi- 
bility be  without  artistic  merit. 

George  Meredith 

The  Times  in  a  leading  article  says  (Jany.  3,  1899)  "a 
talker,"  as  Mr.  George  Meredith  has  somewhere  said,  "in- 
volves the  existence  of  a  talkee,"  or  words  to  this  effect. 

I  said  what  comes  to  the  same  thing  as  this  in  Life  and 
Habit  in  1877,  and  I  repeated  it  in  the  preface  to  my  trans- 
lation of  the  Iliad  in  1898.  I  do  not  believe  George  Meredith 
has  said  anything  to  the  same  effect,  but  I  have  read  so  very 


1 86    The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

little  of  that  writer,  and  have  so  utterly  rejected  what  I  did 
read,  that  he  may  well  have  done  so  without  my  knowing  it. 
He  damned  Erewhon,  as  Chapman  and  Hall's  reader,  in  1871, 
and,  as  I  am  still  raw  about  this  after  28  years,  (I  am  afraid 
unless  I  say  something  more  I  shall  be  taken  as  writing  these 
words  seriously)  I  prefer  to  assert  that  the  Times  writer  was 
quoting  from  my  preface  to  the  Iliad,  published  a  few  weeks 
earlier,  and  fathering  the  remark  on  George  Meredith.  By 
the  way  the  Times  did  not  give  so  much  as  a  line  to  my  trans- 
lation in  its  "Books  of  the  Week,"  though  it  was  duly  sent 
to  them. 

Froude  and  Freeman 

I  think  it  was  last  Saturday  (Ap.  9)  (at  any  rate  it  was  a 
day  just  thereabouts)  the  Times  had  a  leader  on  Froude's 
appointment  as  Reg.  Prof,  of  Mod.  Hist,  at  Oxford.  It  said 
Froude  was  perhaps  our  greatest  living  master  of  style,  or 
words  to  that  effect,  only  that,  like  Freeman,  he  was  too 
long:  i.e.  only  he  is  an  habitual  offender  against  the  most 
fundamental  principles  of  his  art.  If  then  Froude  is  our 
greatest  master  of  style,  what  are  the  rest  of  us  ? 

There  was  a  much  better  article  yesterday  on  Marbot,  on 
which  my  namesake  A.  J.  Butler  got  a  dressing  for  talking 
rubbish  about  style.  [1892.] 

Style 

In  this  day's  Sunday  Times  there  is  an  article  on  Mrs. 
Browning's  letters  which  begins  with  some  remarks  about 
style.  "It  is  recorded,"  says  the  writer,  "of  Plato,  that  in 
a  rough  draft  of  one  of  his  Dialogues,  found  after  his  death, 
the  first  paragraph  was  written  in  seventy  different  forms. 
Wordsworth  spared  no  pains  to  sharpen  and  polish  to  the 
utmost  the  gifts  with  which  nature  had  endowed  him;  and 
Cardinal  Newman,  one  of  the  greatest  masters  of  English 
style,  has  related  in  an  amusing  essay  the  pains  he  took  to 
acquire  his  style." 

I  never  knew  a  writer  yet  who  took  the  smallest  pains 
with  his  style  and  was  at  the  same  time  readable.  Plato's 
having  had  seventy  shies  at  one  sentence  is  quite  enough  to 
explain  to  me  why  I  dislike  him.  A  man  may,  and  ought  to 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     187 

take  a  great  deal  of  pains  to  write  clearly,  tersely  and  euphe- 
mistically :  he  will  write  many  a  sentence  three  or  four  times 
over — to  do  much  more  than  this  is  worse  than  not  re- 
writing at  all:  he  will  be  at  great  pains  to  see  that  he  does 
not  repeat  himself,  to  arrange  his  matter  in  the  way  that 
shall  best  enable  the  reader  to  master  it,  to  cut  out  super- 
fluous words  and,  even  more,  to  eschew  irrelevant  matter: 
but  in  each  case  he  will  be  thinking  not  of  his  own  style  but 
of  his  reader's  convenience. 

Men  like  Newman  and  R.  L.  Stevenson  seem  to  have  taken 
pains  to  acquire  what  they  called  a  style  as  a  preliminary 
measure — as  something  that  they  had  to  form  before  their 
writings  could  be  of  any  value.  I  should  like  to  put  it  on 
record  that  I  never  took  the  smallest  pains  with  my  style, 
have  never  thought  about  it,  and  do  not  know  or  want  to 
know  whether  it  is  a  style  at  all  or  whether  it  is  not,  as  I 
believe  and  hope,  just  common,  simple  straightforwardness. 
I  cannot  conceive  how  any  man  can  take  thought  for  his 
style  without  loss  to  himself  and  his  readers. 

I  have,  however,  taken  all  the  pains  that  I  had  patience 
to  endure  in  the  improvement  of  my  handwriting  (which, 
by  the  way,  has  a  constant  tendency  to  resume  feral  character- 
istics) and  also  with  my  MS.  generally  to  keep  it  clean  and 
legible.  I  am  having  a  great  tidying  just  now,  in  the  course 
of  which  the  MS.  of  Erewhon  turned  up,  and  I  was  struck 
with  the  great  difference  between  it  and  the  MS.  of  The 
Authoress  of  the  Odyssey.  I  have  also  taken  great  pains,  with 
what  success  I  know  not,  to  correct  impatience,  irritability 
and  other  like  faults  in  my  own  character — and  this  not  be- 
cause I  care  two  straws  about  my  own  character,  but  because 
I  find  the  correction  of  such  faults  as  I  have  been  able  to 
correct  makes  life  easier  and  saves  me  from  getting  into 
scrapes,  and  attaches  nice  people  to  me  more  readily.  But  I 
suppose  this  really  is  attending  to  style  after  all.  [1897.] 

Diderot  on  Criticism 

"II  est  si  difficile  de  produire  une  chose  meme  mediocre; 
il  est  si  facile  de  sentir  la  mediocrite." 

I  have  lately  seen  this  quoted  as  having  been  said  by  Di- 
derot. It  is  easy  to  say  we  feel  the  mediocrity  when  we  have 


1 88    The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

heard  a  good  many  people  say  that  the  work  is  mediocre,  but, 
unless  in  matters  about  which  he  has  been  long  conversant,  no 
man  can  easily  form  an  independent  judgment  as  to  whether 
or  not  a  work  is  mediocre.  I  know  that  in  the  matter  of 
books,  painting  and  music  I  constantly  find  myself  unable  to 
form  a  settled  opinion  till  I  have  heard  what  many  men  of 
varied  tastes  have  to  say,  and  have  also  made  myself  ac- 
quainted with  details  about  a  man's  antecedents  and  ways  of 
life  which  are  generally  held  to  be  irrelevant. 

Often,  of  course,  this  is  unnecessary;  a  man's  character, 
if  he  has  left  much  work  behind  him,  or  if  he  is  not  coming 
before  us  for  the  first  time,  is  generally  easily  discovered 
without  extraneous  aid.  We  want  no  one  to  give  us  any 
clues  to  the  nature  of  such  men  as  Giovanni  Bellini,  or  De 
Hooghe.  Hogarth's  character  is  written  upon  his  work  so 
plainly  that  he  who  runs  may  read  it,  so  is  Handel's  upon  his, 
so  is  Purcell's,  so  is  Corelli's,  so,  indeed,  are  the  characters  of 
most  men;  but  often  where  only  little  work  has  been  left, 
or  where  a  work  is  by  a  new  hand,  it  is  exceedingly  difficult 
"sentir  la  mediocrite"  and,  it  might  be  added,  "ou  meme 
sentir  du  tout." 

How  many  years,  I  wonder,  was  it  before  I  learned  to  dis- 
like Thackeray  and  Tennyson  as  cordially  as  I  now  do?  For 
how  many  years  did  I  not  almost  worship  them  ? 

Bunyan  and  Others 

I  have  been  reading  The  Pilgrims  Progress  again — the 
third  part  and  all — and  wish  that  some  one  would  tell  one 
what  to  think  about  it. 

The  English  is  racy,  vigorous  and  often  very  beautiful ; 
but  the  language  of  any  book  is  nothing  except  in  so  far  as  it 
reveals  the  writer.  The  words  in  which  a  man  clothes  his 
thoughts  are  like  all  other  clothes — the  cut  raises  presump- 
tions about  his  thoughts,  and  these  generally  turn  out  to  be 
just,  but  the  words  are  no  more  the  thoughts  than  a  man's 
coat  is  himself.  I  am  not  sure,  however,  that  in  Bunyan's 
case  the  dress  in  which  he  has  clothed  his  ideas  does  not 
reveal  him  more  justly  than  the  ideas  do. 

The  Pilgrim's  Progress  consists  mainly  of  a  series  of  in- 
famous libels  upon  life  and  things ;  it  is  a  blasphemy  against 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     189 

certain  fundamental  ideas  of  right  and  wrong  which  our 
consciences  most  instinctively  approve;  its  notion  of  heaven 
is  hardly  higher  than  a  transformation  scene  at  Drury  Lane ; 
it  is  essentially  infidel.  "Hold  out  to  me  the  chance  of  a 
golden  crown  and  harp  with  freedom  from  all  further  wor- 
ries, give  me  angels  to  flatter  me  and  fetch  and  carry  for  me, 
and  I  shall  think  the  game  worth  playing,  notwithstanding  the 
great  and  horrible  risk  of  failure;  but  no  crown,  no  cross  for 
me.  Pay  me  well  and  I  will  wait  for  payment,  but  if  I  have 
to  give  credit  I  shall  expect  to  be  paid  better  in  the  end." 

There  is  no  conception  of  the  faith  that  a  man  should  do 
his  duty  cheerfully  with  all  his  might  though,  as  far  as  he 
can  see,  he  will  never  be  paid  directly  or  indirectly  either 
here  or  hereafter.  Still  less  is  there  any  conception  that  un- 
less a  man  has  this  faith  he  is  not  worth  thinking  about. 
There  is  no  sense  that  as  we  have  received  freely  so  we  should 
give  freely  and  be  only  too  thankful  that  we  have  anything 
to  give  at  all.  Furthermore  there  does  not  appear  to  be  even 
the  remotest  conception  that  this  honourable,  comfortable 
and  sustaining  faith  is,  like  all  other  high  faiths,  to  be  brushed 
aside  very  peremptorily  at  the  bidding  of  common-sense. 

What  a  pity  it  is  that  Christian  never  met  Mr.  Common- 
Sense  with  his  daughter,  Good-Humour,  and  her  affianced 
husband,  Mr.  Hate-Cant;  but  if  he  ever* saw  them  in  the 
distance  he  steered  clear  of  them,  probably  as  feeling  that 
they  would  be  more  dangerous  than  Giant  Despair,  Vanity 
Fair  and  Apollyon  all  together — for  they  would  have  stuck 
to  him  if  he  had  let  them  get  in  with  him.  Among  other 
things  they  would  have  told  him  that,  if  there  was  any  truth 
in  his  opinions,  neither  man  nor  woman  ought  to  become  a 
father  or  mother  at  all,  inasmuch  as  their  doing  so  would 
probably  entail  eternity  of  torture  on  the  wretched  creature 
whom  they  were  launching  into  the  world.  Life  in  this  world 
is  risk  enough  to  inflict  on  another  person  who  has  not  been 
consulted  in  the  matter,  but  death  will  give  quittance  in  full. 
To  weaken  our  faith  in  this  sure  and  certain  hope  of  peace 
eternal  (except  so  far  as  we  have  so  lived  as  to  win  life  in 
others  after  we  are  gone)  would  be  a  cruel  thing,  even  though 
the  evidence  against  it  were  overwhelming,  but  to  rob  us  of 
it  on  no  evidence  worth  a  moment's  consideration  and,  ap- 
parently, from  no  other  motive  than  the  pecuniary  advan- 


190     The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

tage  of  the  robbers  themselves  is  infamy.  For  the  Churches 
are  but  institutions  for  the  saving  of  men's  souls  from 
hell. 

This  is  true  enough.  Nevertheless  it  is  untrue  that  in 
practice  any  Christian  minister,  knowing  what  he  preaches 
to  be  both  very  false  and  very  cruel,  yet  insists  on  it  because 
it  is  to  the  advantage  of  his  own  order.  In  a  way  the  preach- 
ers believe  what  they  preach,  but  it  is  as  men  who  have  taken 
a  bad  £10  note  and  refuse  to  look  at  the  evidence  that  makes 
for  its  badness,  though,  if  the  note  were  not  theirs,  they 
would  see  at  a  glance  that  it  was  not  a  good  one.  For  the 
man  in  the  street  it  is  enough  that  what  the  priests  teach  in 
respect  of  a  future  state  is  palpably  both  cruel  and  absurd 
while,  at  the  same  time,  they  make  their  living  by  teaching 
it  and  thus  prey  upon  other  men's  fears  of  the  unknown.  If 
the  Churches  do  not  wish  to  be  misunderstood  they  should 
not  allow  themselves  to  remain  in  such  an  equivocal  position. 

But  let  this  pass.  Bunyan,  we  may  be  sure,  took  all  that 
he  preached  in  its  most  literal  interpretation ;  he  could  never 
have  made  his  book  so  interesting  had  he  not  done  so.  The 
interest  of  it  depends  almost  entirely  on  the  unquestionable 
good  faith  of  the  writer  and  the  strength  of  the  impulse  that 
compelled  him  to  speak  that  which  was  within  him.  He 
was  not  writing  a  book  which  he  might  sell,  he  was  speaking 
what  was  borne  in  upon  him  from  heaven.  The  message  he 
uttered  was,  to  my  thinking,  both  low  and  false,  but  it  was 
truth  of  truths  to  Bunyan. 

No.  This  will  not  do.  The  Epistles  of  St.  Paul  were  truth 
of  truths  to  Paul,  but  they  do  not  attract  us  to  the  man  who 
wrote  them,  and,  except  here  and  there,  they  are  very  un- 
interesting. Mere  strength  of  conviction  on  a  writer's  part 
is  not  enough  to  make  his  work  take  permanent  rank.  Yet  I 
know  that  I  could  read  the  whole  of  The  Pilgrim's  Progress 
(except  occasional  episodical  sermons)  without  being  at  all 
bored  by  it,  whereas,  having  spent  a  penny  upon  Mr.  Stead's 
abridgement  of  Joseph  Andrews,  I  had  to  give  it  up  as  putting 
me  out  of  all  patience.  I  then  spent  another  penny  on  an 
abridgement  of  Gulliver's  Travels,  and  was  enchanted  by  it. 
What  is  it  that  makes  one  book  so  readable  and  another  so 
unreadable  ?  Swift,  from  all  I  can  make  out,  was  a  far  more 
human  and  genuine  person  than  he  is  generally  represented, 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     191 

but  I  do  not  think  I  should  have  liked  him,  whereas  Fielding, 
I  am  sure,  must  have  been  delightful.  Why  do  the  faults  of 
his  work  overweigh  its  many  great  excellences,  while  the 
less  great  excellences  of  the  Voyage  to  Lilliput  outweigh  its 
more  serious  defects  ? 

I  suppose  it  is  the  prolixity  of  Fielding  that  fatigues  me. 
Swift  is  terse,  he  gets  through  what  he  has  to  say  on  any 
matter  as  quickly  as  he  can  and  takes  the  reader  on  to  the 
next,  whereas  Fielding  is  not  only  long,  but  his  length  is 
made  still  longer  by  the  disconnectedness  of  the  episodes 
that  appear  to  have  been  padded  into  the  books — episodes 
that  do  not  help  one  forward,  and  are  generally  so  exag- 
gerated, and  often  so  full  of  horse-play  as  to  put  one  out  of 
conceit  with  the  parts  that  are  really  excellent. 

Whatever  else  Bunyan  is  he  is  never  long;  he  takes  you 
quickly  on  from  incident  to  incident  and,  however  little  his 
incidents  may  appeal  to  us,  we  feel  that  he  is  never  giving  us 
one  that  is  not  bona  fide  so  far  as  he  is  concerned.  His 
episodes  and  incidents  are  introduced  not  because  he  wants 
to  make  his  book  longer  but  because  he  cannot  be  satisfied 
without  these  particular  ones,  even  though  he  may  feel  that 
his  book  is  getting  longer  than  he  likes. 


And  here  I  must  break  away  from  this  problem,  leaving 
it  unsolved.  [1897.] 

Bunyan  and  the  Odyssey 

Anything  worse  than  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  in  the  matter 
of  defiance  of  literary  canons  can  hardly  be  conceived.  The 
allegory  halts  continually;  it  professes  to  be  spiritual,  but 
nothing  can  be  more  carnal  than  the  golden  splendour  of  the 
eternal  city;  the  view  of  life  and  the  world  generally  is  flat 
blasphemy  against  the  order  of  things  with  which  we  are  sur- 
rounded. Yet,  like  the  Odyssey,  which  flatly  defies  sense  and 
criticism  (no,  it  doesn't;  still,  it  defies  them  a  good  deal), 
no  one  can  doubt  that  it  must  rank  among  the  very  greatest 
books  that  have  ever  been  written.  How  Odyssean  it  is  in 
its  sincerity  and  downrightness,  as  well  as  in  the  marvellous 
beauty  of  its  language,  its  freedom  from  all  taint  of  the  schools 


192    The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

and,  not  least,  in  complete  victory  of  genuine  internal  zeal 
over  a  scheme  initially  so  faulty  as  to  appear  hopeless. 

I  read  that  part  where  Christian  passes  the  lions  which  he 
thought  were  free  but  which  were  really  chained  and  it  oc- 
curred to  me  that  all  lions  are  chained  until  they  actually 
eat  us  and  that,  the  moment  they  do  this,  they  chain  them- 
selves up  again  automatically,  as  far  as  we  are  concerned.  If 
one  dissects  this  passage  it  fares  as  many  a  passage  in  the 
Odyssey  does  when  we  dissect  it.  Christian  did  not,  after  all, 
venture  to  pass  the  lions  till  he  was  assured  that  they  were 
chained.  And  really  it  is  more  excusable  to  refuse  point- 
blank  to  pass  a  couple  of  lions  till  one  knows  whether  they 
are  chained  or  not — and  the  poor  wicked  people  seem  to  have 
done  nothing  more  than  this, — than  it  would  be  to  pass  them. 
Besides,  by  being  told,  Christian  fights,  as  it  were,  with  loaded 
dice. 

Poetry 

The  greatest  poets  never  write  poetry.  The  Homers  and 
Shakespeares  are  not  the  greatest — they  are  only  the  greatest 
that  we  can  know.  And  so  with  Handel  among  musicians. 
For  the  highest  poetry,  whether  in  music  or  literature,  is 
ineffable — it  must  be  felt  from  one  person  to  another,  it  can- 
not be  articulated. 

Verse 

Versifying  is  the  lowest  form  of  poetry ;  and  the  last  thing 
a  great  poet  will  do  in  these  days  is  to  write  verses. 

I  have  been  trying  to  read  Venus  and  Adonis  and  the  Rape 
of  Lucrece  but  cannot  get  on  with  them.  They  teem  with  fine 
things,  but  they  are  got-up  fine  things.  I  do  not  know 
whether  this  is  quite  what  I  mean  but,  come  what  may,  I  find 
the  poems  bore  me.  Were  I  a  schoolmaster  I  should  think  I 
was  setting  a  boy  a  very  severe  punishment  if  I  told  him  to 
read  Venus  and  Adonis  through  in  three  sittings.  If,  then, 
the  magic  of  Shakespeare's  name,  let  alone  the  great  beauty 
of  occasional  passages,  cannot  reconcile  us  (for  I  find  most 
people  of  the  same  mind)  to  verse,  and  especially  rhymed 
verse  as  a  medium  of  sustained  expression,  what  chance  has 
any  one  else?  It  seems  to  me  that  a  sonnet  is  the  utmost 
length  to  which  a  rhymed  poem  should  extend. 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     193 

Verse,  Poetry  and  Prose 

The  preface  to  Bunyan's  Pilgrim's  Progress  is  verse,  but 
it  is  not  poetry.  The  body  of  the  work  is  poetry,  but  it  is  not 
verse. 

Ancient  Work 

If  a  person  would  understand  either  the  Odyssey  or  any 
other  ancient  work,  he  must  never  look  at  the  dead  without 
seeing  the  living  in  them,  nor  at  the  living  without  thinking 
of  the  dead.  We  are  too  fond  of  seeing  the  ancients  as  one 
thing  and  the  moderns  as  another. 

Nausicaa  and  Myself 

I  am  elderly,  grey-bearded  and,  according  to  my  clerk, 
Alfred,  disgustingly  "fat ;  I  wear  spectacles  and  get  more  and 
more  bronchitic  as  I  grow  older.  Still  no  young  prince  in  a 
fairy  story  ever  found  an  invisible  princess  more  effectually 
hidden  behind  a  hedge  of  dullness  or  more  fast  asleep  than 
Nausicaa  was  when  I  woke  her  and  hailed  her  as  Authoress 
of  the  Odyssey.  And  there  was  no  difficulty  about  it  either 
— all  one  had  to  do  was  to  go  up  to  the  front  door  and  ring 
the  bell. 

Telemachus  and  Nicholas  Nickleby 

The  virtuous  young  man  defending  a  virtuous  mother 
against  a  number  of  powerful  enemies  is  one  of  the  ignes 
fatui  of  literature.  The  scheme  ought  to  be  very  interesting, 
and  often  is  so,  but  it  always  fails  as  regards  the  hero  who, 
from  Telemachus  to  Nicholas  Nickleby,  is  always  too  much  of 
the  good  young  man  to  please. 

Gadshill  and  Trapani 

While  getting  our  lunch  one  Sunday  at  the  east  end  of  the 
long  room  in  the  Sir  John  Falstaff  Inn,  Gadshill,  we  over- 
heard some  waterside-looking  dwellers  in  the  neighbourhood 
talking  among  themselves.  I  wrote  down  the  following: — 

Bill:  Oh,  yes.    I've  got  a  mate  that  works  in  my  shop ;  he's 


194    The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

chucked  the  Dining  Room  because  they  give  him  too  much 
to  eat.  He  found  another  place  where  they  gave  him  four 
pennyworth  of  meat  and  two  vegetables  and  it  was  quite  as 
much  as  he  could  put  up  with. 

George:  You  can't  kid  me,  Bill,  that  they  give  you  too  much 
to  eat,  but  I'll  believe  it  to  oblige  you,  Bill.  Shall  I  see  you 
to-night  ? 

Bill:  No,  I  must  go  to  church. 

George:  Well,  so  must  I ;  I've  got  to  go. 

So  at  Trapani,  I  heard  two  small  boys  one  night  on  the 
quay  (I  am  sure  I  have  written  this  down  somewhere,  but  it 
is  less  trouble  to  write  it  again  than  to  hunt  for  it)  singing 
with  all  their  might,  with  their  arms  round  one  another's 
necks.  I  should  say  they  were  about  ten  years  old,  not 
more. 

I  asked  Ignazio  Giacalone :  "What  are  they  singing  ?" 

He  replied  that  it  was  a  favourite  song  among  the  popolino 
of  Trapani  about  a  girl  who  did  not  want  to  be  seen  going 
about  with  a  man.  "The  people  in  this  place,"  says  the  song, 
"are  very  ill-natured,  and  if  they  see  you  and  me  together, 
they  will  talk,"  &c. 

I  do  not  say  that  there  was  any  descent  here  from 
Nausicaa's  speech  to  Ulysses,  but  I  felt  as  though  that  speech 
was  still  in  the  air.  [Od.  VI.  273.] 

I  reckon  Gadshill  and  Trapani  as  perhaps  the  two  most 
classic  grounds  that  I  frequent  familiarly,  and  at  each  I  have 
seemed  to  hear  echoes  of  the  scenes  that  have  made  them 
famous.  Not  that  what  I  heard  at  Gadshill  is  like  any  par- 
ticular passage  in  Shakespeare. 

Waiting  to  be  Hired 

At  Castelvetrano  (about  thirty  miles  from  Trapani)  I  had 
to  start  the  next  morning  at  4  a.m.  to  see  the  ruins  of 
Selinunte,  and  slept  lightly  with  my  window  open.  About 
two  o'clock  I  began  to  hear  a  buzz  of  conversation  in  the 
piazza  outside  and  it  kept  me  awake,  so  I  got  up  to  shut  the 
window  and  see  what  it  was.  I  found  it  came  from  a  long 
knot  of  men  standing  about,  two  deep,  but  not  strictly  mar- 
shalled. When  I  got  up  at  half-past  three,  it  was  still  dark 
and  the  men  were  still  there,  though  perhaps  not  so  many. 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     195 

I  enquired  and  found  they  were  standing  to  be  hired  for 
the  day,  any  one  wanting  labourers  would  come  there,  en- 
gage as  many  as  he  wanted  and  go  off  with  them,  others 
would  come  up,  and  so  on  till  about  four  o'clock,  after  which 
no  one  would  hire,  the  day  being  regarded  as  short  in  weight 
after  that  hour.  Being  so  collected  the  men  gossip  over  their 
own  and  other  people's  affairs — wonder  who  was  that  fine- 
looking  stranger  going  about  yesterday  with  Nausicaa,  and 
so  on.  [Od.  VI.  273.]  This,  in  fact,  is  their  club  and  the 
place  where  the  public  opinion  of  the  district  is  formed. 

Ilium  and  Padua 

The  story  of  the  Trojan  horse  is  more  nearly  within  possi- 
bility than  we  should  readily  suppose.  In  1848,  during  the 
rebellion  of  the  North  Italians  against  the  Austrians,  eight 
or  nine  young  men,  for  whom  the  authorities  were  hunting, 
hid  themselves  inside  Donatello's  wooden  horse  in  the  Salone 
at  Padua  and  lay  there  for  five  days,  being  fed  through  the 
trap  door  on  the  back  of  the  horse  with  the  connivance  of  the 
custode  of  the  Salone.  No  doubt  they  were  let  out  for  a 
time  at  night.  When  pursuit  had  become  less  hot,  their 
friends  smuggled  them  away.  One  of  those  who  had  been 
shut  up  was  still  living  in  1898  and,  on  the  occasion  of  the 
jubilee  festivities,  was  carried  round  the  town  in  triumph. 

Eumaeus  and  Lord  Burleigh 

The  inference  which  Arthur  Platt  (Journal  of  Philology, 
Vol.  24,  No.  47)  wishes  to  draw  from  Eumaeus  being  told  to 
bring  Ulysses'  bow  &v a  Sw/iara  (Od.  XXI.  234)  suggests  to 
me  the  difference  which  some  people  in  future  ages  may  wish 
to  draw  between  the  character  of  Lord  Burleigh's  steps  in 
Tennyson's  poem,  according  as  he  was  walking  up  or  pacing 
down.  Wherefrom  also  the  critic  will  argue  that  the  scene 
of  Lord  Burleigh's  weeping  must  have  been  on  an  inclined 
plane. 

Weeping,  weeping  late  and  early, 

Walking  up  and  pacing  down, 
Deeply  mourned  the  Lord  of  Burleigh, 

Burleigh-house  by  Stamford-town. 


196     The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

My  Reviewers'  Sense  of  Need 

My  reviewers  felt  no  sense  of  need  to  understand  me — if 
they  had  they  would  have  developed  the  mental  organism 
which  would  have  enabled  them  to  do  so.  When  the  time 
comes  that  they  want  to  do  so  they  will  throw  out  a  little 
mental  pseudopodium  without  much  difficulty.  They  threw 
it  out  when  they  wanted  to  misunderstand  me — with  a  good 
deal  of  the  pseudo  in  it,  too. 


The  amount  of  pains  which  my  reviewers  have  taken  to 
understand  this  book  is  not  so  great  as  to  encourage  the 
belief  that  they  would  understand  the  Odyssey,  however 
much  they  studied  it.  Again,  the  people  who  could  read  the 
Odyssey  without  coming  to  much  the  same  conclusions  as 
mine  are  not  likely  to  admit  that  they  ought  to  have  done  so. 

If  a  man  tells  me  that  a  house  in  which  I  have  long  lived 
is  inconvenient,  not  to  say  unwholesome,  and  that  I  have 
been  very  stupid  in  not  finding  this  out  for  myself,  I  should 
be  apt  in  the  first  instance  to  tell  him  that  he  knew  nothing 
about  it,  and  that  I  was  quite  comfortable;  by  and  by,  I 
should  begin  to  be  aware  that  I  was  not  so  comfortable  as  I 
thought  I  was,  and  in  the  end  I  should  probably  make  the 
suggested  alterations  in  my  house  if,  on  reflection,  I  found 
them  sensibly  conceived.  But  I  should  kick  hard  at  first. 

Homer  and  his  Commentators 

Homeric  commentators  have  been  blind  so  long  that  noth- 
ing will  do  for  them  but  Homer  must  be  blind  too.  They 
have  transferred  their  own  blindness  to  the  poet. 

The  Iliad 

In  the  Iliad,  civilisation  bursts  upon  us  as  a  strong  stream 
out  of  a  rock.  We  know  that  the  water  has  gathered  from 
many  a  distant  vein  underground,  but  we  do  not  see  these. 
Or  it  is  like  the  drawing  up  the  curtain  on  the  opening  of  a 
play — the  scene  is  then  first  revealed. 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     197 

Glacial  Periods  of  Folly 

The  moraines  left  by  secular  glacial  periods  of  folly  stretch 
out  over  many  a  plain  of  our  civilisation.  So  in  the  Odyssey, 
especially  in  the  second  twelve  books,  whenever  any  one 
eats  meat  it  is  called  "sacrificing"  it,  as  though  we  were 
descended  from  a  race  that  did  not  eat  meat.  Then  it  was 
said  that  meat  might  be  eaten  if  one  did  not  eat  the  life. 
What  was  the  life?  Clearly  the  blood,  for  when  you  stick  a 
pig  it  lives  till  the  blood  is  gone.  You  must  sacrifice  the 
blood,  therefore,  to  the  gods,  but  so  long  as  you  abstain 
from  things  strangled  and  from  blood,  and  so  long  as  you 
call  it  sacrificing,  you  may  eat  as  much  meat  as  you  please. 

What  a  mountain  of  lies — what  a  huge  geological  forma- 
tion of  falsehood,  with  displacement  of  all  kinds,  and  strata 
twisted  every  conceivable  way,  must  have  accreted  before  the 
Odyssey  was  possible! 

Translations  from  Verse  into  Prose 

Whenever  this  is  attempted,  great  licence  must  be  allowed 
to  the  translator  in  getting  rid  of  all  those  poetical  common 
forms  which  are  foreign  to  the  genius  of  prose.  If  the  work 
is  to  be  translated  into  prose,  let  it  be  into  such  prose  as 
we  write  and  speak  among  ourselves.  A  volume  of  poetical 
prose,  i.e.  affected  prose,  had  better  be  in  verse  outright 
at  once.  Poetical  prose  is  never  tolerable  for  more  than  a 
very  short  bit  at  a  time.  And  it  may  be  questioned  whether 
poetry  itself  is  not  better  kept  short  in  ninety-nine  cases  out 
of  a  hundred. 

Translating  the  Odyssey 

If  you  wish  to  preserve  the  spirit  of  a  dead  author,  you 
must  not  skin  him,  stuff  him,  and  set  him  up  in  a  case.  You 
must  eat  him,  digest  him  and  let  him  live  in  you,  with  such 
life  as  you  have,  for  better  or  worse.  The  difference  between 
the  Andrew  Lang  manner  of  translating  the  Odyssey  and 
mine  is  that  between  making  a  mummy  and  a  baby.  He 
tries  to  preserve  a  corpse  ( for  the  Odyssey  is  a  corpse  to  all 
who  need  Lang's  translation),  whereas  I  try  to  originate  a 


198     The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature 

new  life  and  one  that  is  instinct  (as  far  as  I  can  effect  this) 
with  the  spirit  though  not  the  form  of  the  original. 

They  say  no  woman  could  possibly  have  written  the  Odys- 
sey. To  me,  on  the  other  hand,  it  seems  even  less  possible 
that  a  man  could  have  done  so.  As  for  its  being  by  a  prac- 
tised and  elderly  writer,  nothing  but  youth  and  inexperience 
could  produce  anything  so  naive  and  so  lovely.  That  is 
where  the  work  will  suffer  by  my  translation.  I  am  male, 
practised  and  elderly,  and  the  trail  of  sex,  age  and  experience 
is  certain  to  be  over  my  translation.  If  the  poem  is  ever  to  be 
well  translated,  it  must  be  by  some  high-spirited  English  girl 
who  has  been  brought  up  at  Athens  and  who,  therefore,  has 
not  been  jaded  by  academic  study  of  the  language. 

A  translation  is  at  best  a  dislocation,  a  translation  from 
verse  to  prose  is  a  double  dislocation  and  corresponding 
further  dislocations  are  necessary  if  an  effect  of  deformity 
is  to  be  avoided. 

The  people  who,  when  they  read  "Athene"  translated 
by  "Minerva,"  cannot  bear  in  mind  that  every  Athene  varies 
more  or  less  with,  and  takes  colour  from,  the  country  and 
temperament  of  the  writer  who  is  being  translated,  will  not 
be  greatly  helped  by  translating  "Athene"  and  not  "Minerva." 
Besides  many  readers  would  pronounce  the  word  as  a  dissyl- 
lable or  an  anapaest. 

The  Odyssey  and  a  Tomb  at  Carcassonne 

There  is  a  tomb  at  some  place  in  France,  I  think  at  Car- 
cassonne, on  which  there  is  some  sculpture  representing  the 
friends  and  relations  of  the  deceased  in  paroxysms  of  grief 
with  their  cheeks  all  cracked,  and  crying  like  Gaudenzio's 
angels  on  the  Sacro  Monte  at  Varallo-Sesia.  Round  the 
corner,  however,  just  out  of  sight  till  one  searches,  there  is 
a  man  holding  both  his  sides  and  splitting  with  laughter. 
In  some  parts  of  the  Odyssey,  especially  about  Ulysses  and 
Penelope,  I  fancy  that  laughing  man  as  being  round  the 
corner.  [Oct.  1891.] 

Getting  it  Wrong 

Zeffirino  Carestia,  a  sculptor,  told  me  we  had  a  great 
sculptor  in  England  named  Simpson.  I  demurred,  and 


The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Literature     199 

asked  about  his  work.  It  seemed  he  had  made  a  monument 
to  Nelson  in  Westminster  Abbey.  Of  course  I  saw  he  meant 
Stevens,  who  had  made  a  monument  to  Wellington  in  St. 
Paul's.  I  cross-questioned  him  and  found  I  was  right. 

Suppose  that  in  some  ancient  writer  I  had  come  upon  a 
similar  error  about  which  I  felt  no  less  certain  than  I  did 
here,  ought  I  to  be  debarred  from  my  conclusion  merely 
by  the  accident  that  I  have  not  the  wretched  muddler  at 
my  elbow  and  cannot  ask  him  personally?  People  are 
always  getting  things  wrong.  It  is  the  critic's  business  to 
know  how  and  when  to  believe  on  insufficient  evidence  and 
to  know  how  far  to  go  in  the  matter  of  setting  people  right 
without  going  too  far;  the  question  of  what  is  too  far  and 
what  is  sufficient  evidence  can  only  be  settled  by  the  hig- 
gling and  haggling  of  the  literary  market. 

So  I  justify  my  emendation  of  the  "grotta  del  toro"  at 
Trapani.  [The  Authoress  of  the  Odyssey,  Chap.  VIII.] 
"II  toro  macigna  un  tesoro  di  oro."  [The  bull  is  grinding 
a  treasure  of  gold]  in  the  grotto  in  which  (for  other  reasons) 
I  am  convinced  Ulysses  hid  the  gifts  the  Phceacians  had 
given  him.  And  so  the  grotto  is  called  "La  grotta  del  toro" 
[The  grotto  of  the  bull].  I  make  no  doubt  it  was  originally 
called  "La  grotta  del  tesoro"  [The  grotto  of  the  treasure], 
but  children  got  it  wrong,  and  corrupted  "tesoro"  into  "toro" ; 
then,  it  being  known  that  the  "tesoro"  was  in  it  somehow,  the 
"toro"  was  made  to  grind  the  "tesoro." 


XIII 
Unprofessional  Sermons 


Righteousness 

ACCORDING  to  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold,  as  we  find  the  highest 
traditions  of  grace,  beauty  and  the  heroic  virtues  among  the 
Greeks  and  Romans,  so  we  derive  our  highest  ideal  of  right- 
eousness from  Jewish  sources.  Righteousness  was  to  the 
Jew  what  strength  and  beauty  were  to  the  Greek  or  fortitude 
to  the  Roman. 

This  sounds  well,  but  can  we  think  that  the  Jews  taken 
as  a  nation  were  really  more  righteous  than  the  Greeks 
and  Romans?  Could  they  indeed  be  so  if  they  were  less 
strong,  graceful  and  enduring?  In  some  respects  they 
may  have  been — every  nation  has  its  strong  points — but 
surely  there  has  been  a  nearly  unanimous  verdict  for  many 
generations  that  the  typical  Greek  or  Roman  is  a  higher, 
nobler  person  than  the  typical  Jew — and  this  referring  not 
to  the  modern  Jew,  who  may  perhaps  be  held  to  have  been 
injured  by  centuries  of  oppression,  but  to  the  Hebrew  of 
the  time  of  the  old  prophets  and  of  the  most  prosperous 
eras  in  the  history  of  the  nation.  If  three  men  could  be  set 
before  us  as  the  most  perfect  Greek,  Roman  and  Jew  re- 
spectively, and  if  we  could  choose  which  we  would  have 
our  only  son  most  resemble,  is  it  not  likely  we  should  find 
ourselves  preferring  the  Greek  or  Roman  to  the  Jew?  And 
does  not  this  involve  that  we  hold  the  two  former  to  be  the 
more  righteous  in  a  broad  sense  of  the  word? 

I  dare  not  say  that  we  owe  no  benefits  to  the  Jewish  nation, 
I  do  not  feel  sure  whether  we  do  or  do  not,  but  I  can  see  no 
good  thing  that  I  can  point  to  as  a  notoriously  Hebrew  con- 

200 


Unprofessional  Sermons  201 

tribution  to  our  moral  and  intellectual  well-being  as  I  can 
point  to  our  law  and  say  that  it  is  Roman,  or  to  our  fine  arts 
and  say  that  they  are  based  on  what  the  Greeks  and  Italians 
taught  us.  On  the  contrary,  if  asked  what  feature  of  post- 
Christian  life  we  had  derived  most  distinctly  from  Hebrew 
sources  I  should  say  at  once  "intolerance" — the  desire  to 
dogmatise  about  matters  whereon  the  Greek  and  Roman 
held  certainty  to  be  at  once  unimportant  and  unattainable. 
This,  with  all  its  train  of  bloodshed  and  family  disunion, 
is  chargeable  to  the  Jewish  rather  than  to  any  other  account. 

There  is  yet  another  vice  which  occurs  readily  to  any 
one  who  reckons  up  the  characteristics  which  we  derive 
mainly  from  the  Jews ;  it  is  one  that  we  call,  after  a  Jewish 
sect,  "Pharisaism."  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  no  Greek 
or  Roman  was  ever  a  sanctimonious  hypocrite,  still,  sancti- 
moniousness does  not  readily  enter  into  our  notions  of  Greeks 
and  Romans  and  it  does  so  enter  into  our  notions  of  the 
old  Hebrews.  Of  course,  we  are  all  of  us  sanctimonious 
sometimes ;  Horace  himself  is  so  when  he  talks  about  aurum 
irrepertum  et  sic  melius  situm,  and  as  for  Virgil  he  was  a  prig, 
pure  and  simple;  still,  on  the  whole,  sanctimoniousness  was 
not  a  Greek  and  Roman  vice  and  it  was  a  Hebrew  one.  True, 
they  stoned  their  prophets  freely;  but  these  are  not  the 
Hebrews  to  whom  Mr.  Arnold  is  referring;  they  are  the 
ones  whom  it  is  the  custom  to  leave  out  of  sight  and  out 
of  mind  as  far  as  possible,  so  that  they  should  hardly  count 
as  Hebrews  at  all,  and  none  of  our  characteristics  should  be 
ascribed  to  them. 

Taking  their  literature  I  cannot  see  that  it  deserves  the 
praises  that  have  been  lavished  upon  it.  The  Song  of  Solo- 
mon and  the  book  of  Esther  are  the  most  interesting  in  the 
Old  Testament,  but  these  are  the  very  ones  that  make  the 
smallest  pretensions  to  holiness,  and  even  these  are  neither 
of  them  of  very  transcendent  merit.  They  would  stand  no 
chance  of  being  accepted  by  Messrs.  Cassell  and  Co.  or  by 
any  biblical  publisher  of  the  present  day.  Chatto  and  Windus 
might  take  the  Song  of  Solomon,  but,  with  this  exception,  I 
doubt  if  there  is  a  publisher  in  London  who  would  give  a 
guinea  for  the  pair.  Ecclesiastes  contains  some  fine  things 
but  is  strongly  tinged  with  pessimism,  cynicism  and  affecta- 
tion. Some  of  the  Proverbs  are  good,  but  not  many  of  them 


202  Unprofessional  Sermons 

are  in  common  use.  Job  contains  some  fine  passages,  and  so 
do  some  of  the  Psalms ;  but  the  Psalms  generally  are  poor 
and,  for  the  most  part,  querulous,  spiteful  and  introspective 
into  the  bargain.  Mudie  would  not  take  thirteen  copies  of  the 
lot  if  they  were  to  appear  now  for  the  first  time — unless  in- 
deed their  royal  authorship  were  to  arouse  an  adventitious 
interest  in  them,  or  unless  the  author  were  a  rich  man  who 
played  his  cards  judiciously  with  the  reviewers.  As  for  the 
prophets — we  know  what  appears  to  have  been  the  opinion 
formed  concerning  them  by  those  who  should  have  been  best 
acquainted  with  them ;  I  am  no  judge  as  to  the  merits  of  the 
controversy  between  them  and  their  fellow-countrymen,  but 
I  have  read  their  works  and  am  of  opinion  that  they 
will  not  hold  their  own  against  such  masterpieces  of  modern 
literature  as,  we  will  say,  The  Pilgrim's  Progress,  Robinson 
Crusoe,  Gulliver's  Travels  or  Tom  Jones.  "Whether  there 
be  prophecies,"  exclaims  the  Apostle,  "they  shall  fail."  On 
the  whole  I  should  say  that  Isaiah  and  Jeremiah  must  be  held 
to  have  failed. 

I  would  join  issue  with  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold  on  yet  another 
point.  I  understand  him  to  imply  that  righteousness  should 
be  a  man's  highest  aim  in  life.  I  do  not  like  setting  up 
righteousness,  nor  yet  anything  else,  as  the  highest  aim  in 
life;  a  man  should  have  any  number  of  little  aims  about 
which  he  should  be  conscious  and  for  which  he  should  have 
names,  but  he  should  have  neither  name  for,  nor  consciousness 
concerning  the  main  aim  of  his  life.  Whatever  we  do  we 
must  try  and  do  it  rightly — this  is  obvious — but  righteousness 
implies  something  much  more  than  this:  it  conveys  to  our 
minds  not  only  the  desire  to  get  whatever  we  have  taken 
in  hand  as  nearly  right  as  possible,  but  also  the  general 
reference  of  our  lives  to  the  supposed  will  of  an  unseen  but 
supreme  power.  Granted  that  there  is  such  a  power,  and 
granted  that  we  should  obey  its  will,  we  are  the  more  likely 
to  do  this  the  less  we  concern  ourselves  about  the  matter 
and  the  more  we  confine  our  attention  to  the  things  immedi- 
ately round  about  us  which  seem,  so  to  speak,  entrusted  to 
us  as  the  natural  and  legitimate  sphere  of  our  activity. 
I  believe  a  man  will  get  the  most  useful  information  on  these 
matters  from  modern  European  sources;  next  to  these  he 
will  get  most  from  Athens  and  ancient  Rome.  Mr.  Matthew 


Unprofessional  Sermons  203 

Arnold  notwithstanding,  I  do  not  think  he  will  get  anything 
from  Jerusalem  which  he  will  not  find  better  and  more  easily 
elsewhere.  [1883.] 

Wisdom 

But  where  shall  wisdom  be  found?  (Job  xxviii.  12). 

If  the  writer  of  these  words  meant  exactly  what  he  said, 
he  had  so  little  wisdom  that  he  might  well  seek  more.  He 
should  have  known  that  wisdom  spends  most  of  her  time 
crying  in  the  streets  and  public-houses,  and  he  should  have 
gone  thither  to  look  for  her.  It  is  written  : 

"Wisdom  crieth  without;  she  uttereth  her  voice  in  the 
streets : 

"She  crieth  in  the  chief  place  of  concourse,  in  the  open- 
ings of  the  gates:  in  the  city  she  uttereth  her  words" 
(Prov.  i.  20,  21.) 

If  however  he  meant  rather  "Where  shall  wisdom  be 
regarded  ?"  this,  again,  is  not  a  very  sensible  question.  Peo- 
ple have  had  wisdom  before  them  for  some  time,  and  they 
may  be  presumed  to  be  the  best  judges  of  their  own  affairs, 
yet  they  do  not  generally  show  much  regard  for  wisdom. 
We  may  conclude,  therefore,  that  they  have  found  her  less 
profitable  than  by  her  own  estimate  she  would  appear  to 
be.  This  indeed  is  what  one  of  the  wisest  men  who  ever 
lived — the  author  of  the  Book  of  Ecclesiastes — definitely  con- 
cludes to  be  the  case,  when  he  tells  his  readers  that  they  had 
better  not  overdo  either  their  virtue  or  their  wisdom.  They 
must  not,  on  the  other  hand,  overdo  their  wickedness  nor, 
presumably,  their  ignorance,  still  the  writer  evidently  thinks 
that  error  is  safer  on  the  side  of  too  little  than  of  too  much.* 

Reflection  will  show  that  this  must  always  have  been  true, 
and  must  always  remain  so,  for  this  is  the  side  on  which  error 
is  both  least  disastrous  and  offers  most  place  for  repentance. 
He  who  finds  himself  inconvenienced  by  knowing  too  little 

*  All  things  have  I  seen  in  the  days  of  my  vanity :  there  is  a  just 
man  that  perisheth  in  his  righteousness,  and  there  is  a  wicked  man 
that  prolongeth  his  life  in  his  wickedness. 

Be  not  righteous  over  much ;  neither  make  thyself  over  wise :  why 
shouldest  thou  destroy  thyself? 

Be  not  over  much  wicked,  neither  be  thou  foolish :  why  shouldest 
thou  die  before  thy  time?  (Eccles.  vii.  15,  16,  17). 


204  Unprofessional  Sermons 

can  go  to  the  British  Museum,  or  to  the  Working  Men's  Col- 
lege, and  learn  more;  but  when  a  thing  is  once  well  learnt  it 
is  even  harder  to  unlearn  it  than  it  was  to  learn  it.  Would  it 
be  possible  to  unlearn  the  art  of  speech  or  the  arts  of  reading 
and  writing  even  if  we  wished  to  do  so?  Wisdom  and  knowl- 
edge are,  like  a  bad  reputation,  more  easily  won  than  lost; 
we  got  on  fairly  well  without  knowing  that  the  earth  went 
round  the  sun;  we  thought  the  sun  went  round  the  earth 
until  we  found  it  made  us  uncomfortable  to  think  so  any 
longer,  then  we  altered  our  opinion ;  it  was  not  very  easy  to 
alter  it,  but  it  was  easier  than  it  would  be  to  alter  it  back 
again.  Vestigia  nulla  retrorsum;  the  earth  itself  does  not 
pursue  its  course  more  steadily  than  mind  does  when  it  has 
once  committed  itself,  and  if  we  could  see  the  movements  of 
the  stars  in  slow  time  we  should  probably  find  that  there  was 
much  more  throb  and  tremor  in  detail  than  we  can  take  note  of. 

How,  I  wonder,  will  it  be  if  in  our  pursuit  of  knowledge 
we  stumble  upon  some  awkward  fact  as  disturbing  for  the 
human  race  as  an  enquiry  into  the  state  of  his  own  finances 
may  sometimes  prove  to  the  individual?  The  pursuit  of 
knowledge  can  never  be  anything  but  a  leap  in  the  dark,  and 
a  leap  in  the  dark  is  a  very  uncomfortable  thing.  I  have 
sometimes  thought  that  if  the  human  race  ever  loses  its 
ascendancy  it  will  not  be  through  plague,  famine  or  cata- 
clysm, but  by  getting  to  know  some  little  microbe,  as  it 
were,  of  knowledge  which  shall  get  into  its  system  and  breed 
there  till  it  makes  an  end  of  us.*  It  is  well,  therefore,  that 
there  should  be  a  substratum  of  mankind  who  cannot  by 
any  inducement  be  persuaded  to  know  anything  whatever 
at  all,  and  who  are  resolutely  determined  to  know  nothing 
among  us  but  what  the  parson  tells  them,  and  not  to  be  too 
sure  even  about  that. 

Whence  then  cometh  wisdom  and  where  is  the  place  of 
understanding?  How  does  Job  solve  his  problem? 

"Behold  the  fear  of  the  Lord,  that  is  wisdom:  and  to 
depart  from  evil  is  understanding." 

The  answer  is  all  very  well  as  far  as  it  goes,  but  it  only 
amounts  to  saying  that  wisdom  is  wisdom.  We  know  no 
better  what  the  fear  of  the  Lord  is  than  what  wisdom  is, 

*  Cf.  "Imaginary  Worlds,"  p.  233  post. 


Unprofessional  Sermons  205 

and  we  often  do  not  depart  from  evil  simply  because  we  do 
not  know  that  what  we  are  cleaving  to  is  evil. 

Loving  and  Hating 

I  have  often  said  that  there  is  no  true  love  short  of  eating 
and  consequent  assimilation;  the  embryonic  processes  are 
but  a  long  course  of  eating  and  assimilation — the  sperm  and 
germ  cells,  or  the  two  elements  that  go  to  form  the  new 
animal,  whatever  they  should  be  called,  eat  one  another  up, 
and  then  the  mother  assimilates  them,  more  or  less,  through 
mutual  inter-feeding  and  inter-breeding  between  her  and 
them.  But  the  curious  point  is  that  the  more  profound 
our  love  is  the  less  we  are  conscious  of  it  as  love.  True,  a 
nurse  tells  her  child  that  she  would  like  to  eat  it,  but  this 
is  only  an  expression  that  shows  an  instinctive  recognition 
of  the  fact  that  eating  is  a  mode  of,  or  rather  the  acme  of, 
love — no  nurse  loves  her  child  half  well  enough  to  want 
really  to  eat  it;  put  to  such  proof  as  this  the  love  of  which 
she  is  so  profoundly,  as  she  imagines,  sentient  proves  to  be 
but  skin  deep.  So  with  our  horses  and  dogs:  we  think  we 
dote  upon  them,  but  we  do  not  really  love  them. 

What,  on  the  other  hand,  can  awaken  less  consciousness 
of  warm  affection  than  an  oyster?  Who  would  press  an 
oyster  to  his  heart,  or  pat  it  and  want  to  kiss  it  ?  Yet  nothing 
short  of  its  complete  absorption  into  our  own  being  can  in 
the  least  satisfy  us.  No  merely  superficial  temporary  con- 
tact of  exterior  form  to  exterior  form  will  serve  us.  The 
embrace  must  be  consummate,  not  achieved  by  a  mocking 
environment  of  draped  and  muffled  arms  that  leaves  no 
lasting  trace  on  organisation  or  consciousness,  but  by  an  en- 
folding within  the  bare  and  warm  bosom  of  an  open  mouth — 
a  grinding  out  of  all  differences  of  opinion  by  the  sweet 
persuasion  of  the  jaws,  and  the  eloquence  of  a  tongue  that 
now  convinces  all  the  more  powerfully  because  it  is  inarticu- 
late and  deals  but  with  the  one  universal  language  of  aggluti- 
nation. Then  we  become  made  one  with  what  we  love- 
not  heart  to  heart,  but  protoplasm  to  protoplasm,  and  this 
is  far  more  to  the  purpose. 

The  proof  of  love,  then,  like  that  of  any  other  pleasant 
pudding,  is  in  the  eating,  and  tested  by  this  proof  we  see 


206  Unprofessional  Sermons 

that  consciousness  of  love,  like  all  other  consciousness,  van- 
ishes on  becoming  intense.  While  we  are  yet  fully  aware 
of  it,  we  do  not  love  as  well  as  we  think  we  do.  When  we 
really  mean  business  and  are  hungry  with  affection,  we  do 
not  know  that  we  are  in  love,  but  simply  go  into  the  love- 
shop — for  so  any  eating-house  should  be  more  fitly  called — 
ask  the  price,  pay  our  money  down,  and  love  till  we  can 
either  love  or  pay  no  longer. 

And  so  with  hate.  When  we  really  hate  a  thing  it  makes 
us  sick,  and  we  use  this  expression  to  symbolise  the  utmost 
hatred  of  which  our  nature  is  capable;  but  when  we  know 
we  hate,  our  hatred  is  in  reality  mild  and  inoffensive.  I, 
for  example,  think  I  hate  all  those  people  whose  photographs 
I  see  in  the  shop  windows,  but  I  am  so  conscious  of  this  that 
I  am  convinced,  in  reality,  nothing  would  please  me  better 
than  to  be  in  the  shop  windows  too.  So  when  I  see  the 
universities  conferring  degrees  on  any  one,  or  the  learned 
societies  moulting  the  yearly  medals  as  peacocks  moult  their 
tails,  I  am  so  conscious  of  disapproval  as  to  feel  sure  I  should 
like  a  degree  or  a  medal  too  if  they  would  only  give  me  one, 
and  hence  I  conclude  that  my  disapproval  is  grounded  in 
nothing  more  serious  than  a  superficial,  transient  jealousy. 

The  Roman  Empire 

Nothing  will  ever  die  so  long  as  it  knows  what  to  do  under 
the  circumstances,  in  other  words  so  long  as  it  knows  its 
business.  The  Roman  Empire  must  have  died  of  inexperience 
of  some  kind,  I  should  think  most  likely  it  was  puzzled  to 
death  by  the  Christian  religion.  But  the  question  is  not  so 
much  how  the  Roman  Empire  or  any  other  great  thing 
came  to  an  end — everything  must  come  to  an  end  some  time, 
it  is  only  scientists  who  wonder  that  a  state  should  die — 
the  interesting  question  is  how  did  the  Romans  become  so 
great,  under  what  circumstances  were  they  born  and  bred? 
We  should  watch  childhood  and  schooldays  rather  than  old 
age  and  death-beds. 

As  I  sit  writing  on  the  top  of  a  wild-beast  pen  of  the  amphi- 
theatre of  Aosta  I  may  note,  for  one  thing,  that  the  Romans 
were  not  squeamish,  they  had  no  Society  for  the  Prevention 
of  Cruelty  to  Animals.  Again,  their  ladies  did  not  write 


Unprofessional  Sermons  207 

in  the  newspapers.  Fancy  Miss  Cato  reviewing  Horace! 
They  had  no  Frances  Power  Cobbes,  no  .  .  .  s,  no  .  .  .  s ; 
yet  they  seem  to  have  got  along  quite  nicely  without  these 
powerful  moral  engines.  The  comeliest  and  most  enjoyable 
races  that  we  know  of  were  the  ancient  Greeks,  the  Italians 
and  the  South  Sea  Islanders,  and  they  have  none  of  them  been 
purists. 

Italians  and  Englishmen 

Italians,  and  perhaps  Frenchmen,  consider  first  whether 
they  like  or  want  to  do  a  thing  and  then  whether,  on  the 
whole,  it  will  do  them  any  harm.  Englishmen,  and  perhaps 
Germans,  consider  first  whether  they  ought  to  like  a  thing 
and  often  never  reach  the  questions  whether  they  do  like 
it  and  whether  it  will  hurt.  There  is  much  to  be  said  for 
both  systems,  but  I  suppose  it  is  best  to  combine  them  as  far 
as  possible. 

On  Knowing  what  Gives  us  Pleasure 
i 

One  can  bring  no  greater  reproach  against  a  man  than  to 
say  that  he  does  not  set  sufficient  value  upon  pleasure,  and 
there  is  no  greater  sign  of  a  fool  than  the  thinking  that 
he  can  tell  at  once  and  easily  what  it  is  that  pleases  him. 
To  know  this  is  not  easy,  and  how  to  extend  our  knowledge 
of  it  is  the  highest  and  the  most  neglected  of  all  arts  and 
branches  of  education.  Indeed,  if  we  could  solve  the  diffi- 
culty of  knowing  what  gives  us  pleasure,  if  we  could  find 
its  springs,  its  inception  and  earliest  modus  operandi,  we 
should  have  discovered  the  secret  of  life  and  development, 
for  the  same  difficulty  has  attended  the  development  of  every 
sense  from  touch  onwards,  and  no  new  sense  was  ever  de- 
veloped without  pains.  A  man  had  better  stick  to  known 
and  proved  pleasures,  but,  if  he  will  venture  in  quest  of  new 
ones,  he  should  not  do  so  with  a  light  heart. 

One  reason  why  we  find  it  so  hard  to  know  our  own  likings 
is  because  we  are  so  little  accustomed  to  try;  we  have  our 
likings  found  for  us  in  respect  of  by  far  the  greater  number 
of  the  matters  that  concern  us ;  thus  we  have  grown  all  our 
limbs  on  the  strength  of  the  likings  of  our  ancestors  and  adopt 
these  without  question. 


208  Unprofessional  Sermons 

Another  reason  is  that,  except  in  mere  matters  of  eating 
and  drinking,  people  do  not  realise  the  importance  of  finding 
out  what  it  is  that  gives  them  pleasure  if,  that  is  to  say,  they 
would  make  themselves  as  comfortable  here  as  they  reason- 
ably can.  Very  few,  however,  seem  to  care  greatly  whether 
they  are  comfortable  or  no.  There  are  some  men  so  ignorant 
and  careless  of  what  gives  them  pleasure  that  they  cannot  be 
said  ever  to  have  been  really  born  as  living  beings  at  all. 
They  present  some  of  the  phenomena  of  having  been  born — 
they  reproduce,  in  fact,  so  many  of  the  ideas  which  we 
associate  with  having  been  born  that  it  is  hard  not  to  think 
of  them  as  living  beings — but  in  spite  of  all  appearances  the 
central  idea  is  wanting.  At  least  one  half  of  the  misery 
which  meets  us  daily  might  be  removed  or,  at  any  rate, 
greatly  alleviated,  if  those  who  suffer  by  it  would  think  it 
worth  their  while  to  be  at  any  pains  to  get  rid  of  it.  That 
they  do  not  so  think  is  proof  that  they  neither  know,  nor 
care  to  know,  more  than  in  a  very  languid  way,  what  it  is 
that  will  relieve  them  most  effectually  or,  in  other  words, 
that  the  shoe  does  not  really  pinch  them  so  hard  as  we  think 
it  does.  For  when  it  really  pinches,  as  when  a  man  is  being 
flogged,  he  will  seek  relief  by  any  means  in  his  power.  So 
my  great  namesake  said,  "Surely  the  pleasure  is  as  great  Of 
being  cheated  as  to  cheat";  and  so,  again,  I  remember  to 
have  seen  a  poem  many  years  ago  in  Punch  according  to 
which  a  certain  young  lady,  being  discontented  at  home, 
went  out  into  the  world  in  quest  to  "Some  burden  make 
or  burden  bear,  But  which  she  did  not  greatly  care — Oh 
Miseree!"  So  long  as  there  was  discomfort  somewhere  it 
was  all  right. 

To  those,  however,  who  are  desirous  of  knowing  what 
gives  them  pleasure  but  do  not  quite  know  how  to  set  about 
it  I  have  no  better  advice  to  give  than  that  they  must  take 
the  same  pains  about  acquiring  this  difficult  art  as  about  any 
other,  and  must  acquire  it  in  the  same  way — that  is  by 
attending  to  one  thing  at  a  time  and  not  being  in  too  great  a 
hurry.  Proficiency  is  not  to  be  attained  here,  any  more  than 
elsewhere,  by  short  cuts  or  by  getting  other  people  to  do 
work  that  no  other  than  oneself  can  do.  Above  all  things  it 
is  necessary  here,  as  in  all  other  branches  of  study,  not  to 
think  we  know  a  thing  before  we  do  know  it — to  make  sure 


Unprofessional  Sermons  209 

of  our  ground  and  be  quite  certain  that  we  really  do  like  a 
thing  before  we  say  we  do.  When  you  cannot  decide  whether 
you  like  a  thing  or  not,  nothing  is  easier  than  to  say  so  and 
to  hang  it  up  among  the  uncertainties.  Or  when  you  know 
you  do  not  know  and  are  in  such  doubt  as  to  see  no  chance 
of  deciding,  then  you  may  take  one  side  or  the  other  pro- 
visionally and  throw  yourself  into  it.  This  will  sometimes 
make  you  uncomfortable,  and  you  will  feel  you  have  taken 
the  wrong  side  and  thus  learn  that  the  other  was  the  right 
one.  Sometimes  you  will  feel  you  have  done  right.  Anyway 
ere  long  you  will  know  more  about  it.  But  there  must  have 
been  a  secret  treaty  with  yourself  to  the  effect  that  the 
decision  was  provisional  only.  For,  after  all,  the  most  im- 
portant first  principle  in  this  matter  is  the  not  lightly  think- 
ing you  know  what  you  like  till  you  have  made  sure  of  your 
ground.  I  was  nearly  forty  before  I  felt  how  stupid  it  was  to 
pretend  to  know  things  that  I  did  not  know  and  I  still  often 
catch  myself  doing  so.  Not  one  of  my  school-masters  taught 
me  this,  but  altogether  otherwise. 


I  should  like  to  like  Schumann's  music  better  than  I  do; 
I  dare  say  I  could  make  myself  like  it  better  if  I  tried ;  but 
I  do  not  like  having  to  try  to  make  myself  like  things;  I 
like  things  that  make  me  like  them  at  once  and  no  trying 
at  all. 

iii 

To  know  whether  you  are  enjoying  a  piece  of  music  or  not 
you  must  see  whether  you  find  yourself  looking  at  the  adver- 
tisements of  Pear's  soap  at  the  end  of  the  programme. 

De  Minimis  non  Curat  Lex 

i 

Yes,  but  what  is  a  minimum?  Sometimes  a  maximum  is 
a  minimum,  and  sometimes  the  other  way  about.  If  you 
know  you  know,  and  if  you  don't  you  don't. 

ii 

Yes,  but  what  is  a  minimum  ?  So  increased  material  weight 
involves  increased  moral  weight,  but  where  does  there  begin 


210  Unprofessional  Sermons 

to  be  any  weight  at  all  ?  There  is  a  miracle  somewhere.  At 
the  point  where  two  very  large  nothings  have  united  to  form 
a  very  little  something. 

iii 

There  is  no  such  complete  assimilation  as  assimilation  of 
rhythm.  In  fact  it  is  in  assimilation  of  rhythm  that  what  we 
see  as  assimilation  consists. 

When  two  liquid  bodies  come  together  with  nearly  the 
same  rhythms,  as,  say,  two  tumblers  of  water,  differing  but 
very  slightly,  the  two  assimilate  rapidly — becoming  homo- 
geneous throughout.  So  with  wine  and  water  which  assimi- 
late, or  at  any  rate  form  a  new  homogeneous  substance,  very 
rapidly.  Not  so  with  oil  and  water.  Still,  I  should  like  to 
know  whether  it  would  not  be  possible  to  have  so  much  water 
and  so  little  oil  that  the  water  would  in  time  absorb  the  oil. 

I  have  not  thought  about  it,  but  it  seems  as  though  the 
maxim  de  minimis  non  curat  lex — the  fact  that  a  wrong,  a 
contradiction  in  terms,  a  violation  of  all  our  ordinary  canons 
does  not  matter  and  should  be  brushed  aside — it  seems  as 
though  this  maxim  went  very  low  down  in  the  scale  of  nature, 
as  though  it  were  the  one  principle  rendering  combination 
(integration)  and,  I  suppose,  dissolution  (disintegration) 
also,  possible.  For  combination  of  any  kind  involves  contra- 
diction in  terms;  it  involves  a  self-stultification  on  the  part 
of  one  or  more  things,  more  or  less  complete  in  both  of  them. 
For  one  or  both  cease  to  be,  and  to  cease  to  be  is  to  contradict 
all  one's  fundamental  axioms  or  terms. 

And  this  is  always  going  on  in  the  mental  world  as  much 
as  in  the  material;  everything  is  always  changing  and  stulti- 
fying itself  more  or  less  completely.  There  is  no  permanence 
of  identity  so  absolute,  either  in  the  physical  world,  or  in 
our  conception  of  the  word  "identity,"  that  it  is  not  crossed 
with  the  notion  of  perpetual  change  which,  pro  tanto,  destroys 
identity.  Perfect,  absolute  identity  is  like  perfect,  absolute 
anything — as  near  an  approach  to  nothing,  or  nonsense,  as 
our  minds  can  grasp.  It  is,  then,  in  the  essence  of  our  con- 
ception of  identity  that  nothing  should  maintain  a  perfect 
identity;  there  is  an  element  of  disintegration  in  the  only 
conception  of  integration  that  we  can  form. 

What  is  it,  then,  that  makes  this  conflict  not  only  possible 


Unprofessional  Sermons  211 

and  bearable  but  even  pleasant?  What  is  it  that  so  oils 
the  machinery  of  our  thoughts  that  things  which  would 
otherwise  cause  intolerable  friction  and  heat  produce  no 
jar? 

Surely  it  is  the  principle  that  a  very  overwhelming  major- 
ity rides  rough-shod  with  impunity  over  a  very  small  minor- 
ity ;  that  a  drop  of  brandy  in  a  gallon  of  water  is  practically 
no  brandy ;  that  a  dozen  maniacs  among  a  hundred  thousand 
people  produce  no  unsettling  effect  upon  our  minds;  that 
a  well-written  i  will  go  as  an  i  even  though  the  dot  be  omitted 
— it  seems  to  me  that  it  is  this  principle,  which  is  embodied 
in  de  minimis  non  curat  lex,  that  makes  it  possible  that 
there  should  be  majora  and  a  lex  to  care  about  them.  This 
is  saying  in  another  form  that  association  does  not  stick  to 
the  letter  of  its  bond. 

Saints 

Saints  are  always  grumbling  because  the  world  will  not 
take  them  at  their  own  estimate ;  so  they  cry  out  upon  this 
place  and  upon  that,  saying  it  does  not  know  the  things  be- 
longing to  its  peace  and  that  it  will  be  too  late  soon  and  that 
people  will  be  very  sorry  then  that  they  did  not  make  more 
of  the  grumbler,  whoever  he  may  be,  inasmuch  as  he  will 
make  it  hot  for  them  and  pay  them  out  generally. 

All  this  means :  "Put  me  in  a  better  social  and  financial 
position  than  I  now  occupy;  give  me  more  of  the  good 
things  of  this  life,  if  not  actual  money  yet  authority  (which 
is  better  loved  by  most  men  than  even  money  itself),  to 
reward  me  because  I  am  to  have  such  an  extraordinary  good 
fortune  and  high  position  in  the  world  which  is  to  come." 

When  their  contemporaries  do  not  see  this  and  tell  them 
that  they  cannot  expect  to  have  it  both  ways,  they  lose  their 
tempers,  shake  the  dust  from  their  feet  and  go  sulking  off 
into  the  wilderness. 

This  is  as  regards  themselves ;  to  their  followers  they  say : 
"You  must  not  expect  to  be  able  to  make  the  best  of  both 
worlds.  The  thing  is  absurd ;  it  cannot  be  done.  You  must 
choose  which  you  prefer,  go  in  for  it  and  leave  the  other, 
for  you  cannot  have  both." 

When  a  saint  complains  that  people  do  not  know  the 


212  Unprofessional  Sermons 

things  belonging  to  their  peace,  what  he  really  means  is  that 
they  do  not  sufficiently  care  about  the  things  belonging  to 
his  own  peace. 

Prayer 
i 

Lord,  let  me  know  mine  end,  and  the  number  of  my  days:  that  I  may 
be  certified  how  long  I  have  to  live  (Ps.  xxxix.  5). 

Of  all  prayers  this  is  the  insanest.  That  the  one  who 
uttered  it  should  have  made  and  retained  a  reputation  is  a 
strong  argument  in  favour  of  his  having  been  surrounded 
with  courtiers.  "Lord,  let  me  not  know  mine  end"  would 
be  better,  only  it  would  be  praying  for  what  God  has  already 
granted  us.  "Lord,  let  me  know  A.B.'s  end"  would  be  bad 
enough.  Even  though  A.B.  were  Mr.  Gladstone — we  might 
hear  he  was  not  to  die  yet.  "Lord,  stop  A.B.  from  knowing 
my  end"  would  be  reasonable,  if  there  were  any  use  in  pray- 
ing that  A.B.  might  not  be  able  to  do  what  he  never  can  do. 
Or  can  the  prayer  refer  to  the  other  end  of  life  ?  "Lord,  let 
me  know  my  beginning."  This  again  would  not  be  always 
prudent. 

The  prayer  is  a  silly  piece  of  petulance  and  it  would  have 
served  the  maker  of  it  right  to  have  had  it  granted.  "A 
painful  and  lingering  disease  followed  by  death"  or  "Ninety, 
a  burden  to  yourself  and  every  one  else" — there  is  not  so 
much  to  pick  and  choose  between  them.  Surely,  "I  thank 
thee,  O  Lord,  that  thou  hast  hidden  mine  end  from  me" 
would  be  better.  The  sting  of  death  is  in  foreknowledge  of 
the  when  and  the  how. 

If  again  he  had  prayed  that  he  might  be  able  to  make  his 
psalms  a  little  more  lively,  and  be  saved  from  becoming  the 
bore  which  he  has  been  to  so  many  generations  of  sick  per- 
sons and  young  children — or  that  he  might  find  a  publisher 
for  them  with  greater  facility — but  there  is  no  end  to  it.  The 
prayer  he  did  pray  was  about  the  worst  he  could  have  prayed 
and  the  psalmist,  being  the  psalmist,  naturally  prayed  it — 
unless  I  have  misquoted  him. 

ii 

Prayers  are  to  men  as  dolls  are  to  children.  They  are  not 
without  use  and  comfort,  but  it  is  not  easy  to  take  them  very 


Unprofessional  Sermons  213 

seriously.  I  dropped  saying  mine  suddenly  once  for  all  with- 
out malice  prepense,  on  the  night  of  the  29th  of  September, 
1859,  when  I  went  on  board  the  Raman  Emperor  to  sail  for 
New  Zealand.  I  had  said  them  the  night  before  and  doubted 
not  that  I  was  always  going  to  say  them  as  I  always  had  done 
hitherto.  That  night,  I  suppose,  the  sense  of  change  was  so 
great  that  it  shook  them  quietly  off.  I  was  not  then  a  sceptic ; 
I  had  got  as  far  as  disbelief  in  infant  baptism  but  no  further. 
I  felt  no  compunction  of  conscience,  however,  about  leaving 
off  my  morning  and  evening  prayers — simply  I  could  no 
longer  say  them. 

iii 
Lead  us  not  into  temptation  (Matt.  vi.  13). 

For  example;  I  am  crossing  from  Calais  to  Dover  and 
there  is  a  well-known  popular  preacher  on  board,  say  Arch- 
deacon Farrar. 

I  have  my  camera  in  my  hand  and  though  the  sea  is  rough 
the  sun  is  brilliant.  I  see  the  archdeacon  come  on  board  at 
Calais  and  seat  himself  upon  the  upper  deck,  looking  as 
though  he  had  just  stepped  out  of  a  band-box.  Can  I  be 
expected  to  resist  the  temptation  of  snapping  him?  Suppose 
that  in  the  train  for  an  hour  before  reaching  Calais  I  had  said 
any  number  of  times,  "Lead  us  not  into  temptation,"  is  it 
likely  that  the  archdeacon  would  have  been  made  to  take 
some  other  boat  or  to  stay  in  Calais,  or  that  I  myself,  by 
being  delayed  on  my  homeward  journey,  should  have  been 
led  into  some  other  temptation,  though  perhaps  smaller? 
Had  I  not  better  snap  him  and  have  done  with  it?  Is  there 
enough  chance  of  good  result  to  make  it  worth  while  to  try 
the  experiment?  The  general  consensus  of  opinion  is  that 
there  is  not. 

And  as  for  praying  for  strength  to  resist  temptation — 
granted  that  if,  when  I  saw  the  archdeacon  in  the  band-box 
stage,  I  had  immediately  prayed  for  strength  I  might  have 
been  enabled  to  put  the  evil  thing  from  me  for  a  time,  how 
long  would  this  have  been  likely  to  last  when  I  saw  his  face 
grow  saintlier  and  saintlier  ?  I  am  an  excellent  sailor  myself, 
but  he  is  not,  and  when  I  see  him  there,  his  eyes  closed  and 
his  head  thrown  back,  like  a  sleeping  St.  Joseph  in  a  shovel 
hat,  with  a  basin  beside  him,  can  I  expect  to  be  saved  from 
snapping  him  by  such  a  formula  as  "Deliver  us  from  evil"? 


214  Unprofessional  Sermons 

Is  it  in  photographer's  nature  to  do  so?  When  David  found 
himself  in  the  cave  with  Saul  he  cut  off  one  of  Saul's  coat- 
tails;  if  he  had  had  a  camera  and  there  had  been  enough 
light  he  would  have  photographed  him;  but  would  it  have 
been  in  flesh  and  blood  for  him  neither  to  cut  off  his  coat-tail 
nor  to  snap  him  ? 

There  is  a  photographer  in  every  bush,  going  about  like  a 
roaring  lion  seeking  whom  he  may  devour. 

iv 

Teach  me  to  live  that  I  may  dread 
The  grave  as  little  as  my  bed. 

This  is  from  the  evening  hymn  which  all  respectable  chil- 
dren are  taught.  It  sounds  well,  but  it  is  immoral. 

Our  own  death  is  a  premium  which  we  must  pay  for  the 
far  greater  benefit  we  have  derived  from  the  fact  that  so 
many  people  have  not  only  lived  but  also  died  before  us. 
For  if  the  old  ones  had  not  in  course  of  time  gone  there  would 
have  been  no  progress;  all  our  civilisation  is  due  to  the 
arrangement  whereby  no  man  shall  live  for  ever,  and  to  this 
huge  mass  of  advantage  we  must  each  contribute  our  mite; 
that  is  to  say,  when  our  turn  comes  we  too  must  die.  The 
hardship  is  that  interested  persons  should  be  able  to  scare  us 
into  thinking  the  change  we  call  death  to  be  the  desperate 
business  which  they  make  it  out  to  be.  There  is  no  hardship 
in  having  to  suffer  that  change. 

Bishop  Ken,  however,  goes  too  far.  Undesirable,  of  course, 
death  must  always  be  to  those  who  are  fairly  well  off,  but 
it  is  undesirable  that  any  living  being  should  live  in  habitual 
indifference  to  death.  The  indifference  should  be  kept  for 
worthy  occasions,  and  even  then,  though  death  be  gladly 
faced,  it  is  not  healthy  that  it  should  be  faced  as  though  it 
were  a  mere  undressing  and  going  to  bed. 


XIV 
Higgledy-Piggledy 

Preface  to  Vol.  II 

ON  indexing  this  volume,  as  with  Vols.  I  and  IV  which  are 
already  indexed  and  as,  no  doubt,  will  be  the  case  with  any 
that  I  may  live  to  index  later,  I  am  alarmed  at  the  triviality 
of  many  of  these  notes,  the  ineptitude  of  many  and  the 
obvious  untenableness  of  many  that  I  should  have  done 
much  better  to  destroy. 

Elmsley,  in  one  of  his  letters  to  Dr.  Butler,  says  that  an 
author  is  the  worst  person  to  put  one  of  his  own  works  through 
the  press  (Life  of  Dr.  Butler,  I,  88).  It  seems  to  me  that  he 
is  the  worst  person  also  to  make  selections  from  his  own 
notes  or  indeed  even,  in  my  case,  to  write  them.  I  cannot 
help  it.  They  grew  as,  with  little  disturbance,  they  now 
stand;  they  are  not  meant  for  publication;  the  bad  ones 
serve  as  bread  for  the  jam  of  the  good  ones;  it  was  less 
trouble  to  let  them  go  than  to  think  whether  they  ought  not 
to  be  destroyed.  The  retort,  however,  is  obvious;  no  think- 
ing should  have  been  required  in  respect  of  many — a  glance 
should  have  consigned  them  to  the  waste-paper  basket.  I 
know  it  and  I  know  that  many  a  one  of  those  who  look  over 
these  books — for  that  they  will  be  looked  over  by  not  a  few 
I  doubt  not — will  think  me  to  have  been  a  greater  fool  than 
I  probably  was.  I  cannot  help  it.  I  have  at  any  rate  the 
consolation  of  also  knowing  that,  h,owever  much  I  may  have 
irritated,  displeased  or  disappointed  them,  they  will  not  be 
able  to  tell  me  so ;  and  I  think  that,  to  some,  such  a  record 
of  passing  moods  and  thoughts  good,  bad  and  indifferent 
will  be  more  valuable  as  throwing  light  upon  the  period  to 
which  it  relates  than  it  would  have  been  if  it  had  been  edited 
with  greater  judgment. 

215 


216  Higgledy-Piggledy 

Besides,  Vols.  I  and  IV  being  already  bound,  I  should  not 
have  enough  to  form  Vols.  II  and  III  if  I  cut  out  all  those 
that  ought  to  be  cut  out.  [June,  1898.] 

P.S. — If  I  had  re-read  my  preface  to  Vol.  IV,  I  need  not 
have  written  the  above. 

Waste-Paper  Baskets 

Every  one  should  keep  a  mental  waste-paper  basket  and 
the  older  he  grows  the  more  things  he  will  consign  to  it — 
torn  up  to  irrecoverable  tatters. 

Flies  in  the  Milk-Jug 

Saving  scraps  is  like  picking  flies  out  of  the  milk- jug.  We 
do  not  mind  doing  this,  I  suppose,  because  we  feel  sure  the 
flies  will  never  want  to  borrow  money  off  us.  We  do  not  feel 
so  sure  about  anything  much  bigger  than  a  fly.  If  it  were  a 
mouse  that  had  got  into  the  milk-jug,  we  should  call  the  cat 
at  once. 

My  Thoughts 

They  are  like  persons  met  upon  a  journey;  I  think  them 
very  agreeable  at  first  but  soon  find,  as  a  rule,  that  I  am 
tired  of  them. 

Our  Ideas 

They  are  for  the  most  part  like  bad  sixpences  and  we 
spend  our  lives  in  trying  to  pass  them  on  one  another. 

Cat-Ideas  and  Mouse-Ideas 

We  can  never  get  rid  of  mouse-ideas  completely,  they  keep 
turning  up  again  and  again,  and  nibble,  nibble — no  matter 
how  often  we  drive  them  off.  The  best  way  to  keep  them 
down  is  to  have  a  few  good  strong  cat-ideas  which  will  em- 
brace them  and  ensure  their  not  reappearing  till  they  do  so  in 
another  shape. 

Incoherency  of  New  Ideas 

An  idea  must  not  be  condemned  for  being  a  little  shy  and 
incoherent;  all  new  ideas  are  shy  when  introduced  first 


Higgledy-Piggledy  217 

among  our  old  ones.  We  should  have  patience  and  see 
whether  the  incoherency  is  likely  to  wear  off  or  to  wear  on, 
in  which  latter  case  the  sooner  we  get  rid  of  them  the  better. 

An  Apology  for  the  Devil 

It  must  be  remembered  that  we  have  only  heard  one  side 
of  the  case.  God  has  written  all  the  books. 

Hallelujah 

When  we  exclaim  so  triumphantly  "Hallelujah!  for  the 
Lord  God  omnipotent  reigneth"  we  only  mean  that  we  think 
no  small  beer  of  ourselves,  that  our  God  is  a  much  greater 
God  than  any  one  else's  God,  that  he  was  our  father's  God 
before  us,  and  that  it  is  all  right,  respectable  and  as  it  should 
be. 

Hating 

It  does  not  matter  much  what  a  man  hates  provided  he 
hates  something. 

Hamlet,  Don  Quixote,  Mr.  Pickwick  and  others 

The  great  characters  of  fiction  live  as  truly  as  the  memories 
of  dead  men.  For  the  life  after  death  it  is  not  necessary  that 
a  man  or  woman  should  have  lived. 

Reputation 

The  evil  that  men  do  lives  after  them.  Yes,  and  a  good 
deal  of  the  evil  that  they  never  did  as  well. 

Science  and  Business 

The  best  class  of  scientific  mind  is  the  same  as  the  best 
class  of  business  mind.  The  great  desideratum  in  either  case 
is  to  know  how  much  evidence  is  enough  to  warrant  action. 
It  is  as  unbusiness-like  to  want  too  much  evidence  before 
buying  or  selling  as  to  be  content  with  too  little.  The  same 
kind  of  qualities  are  wanted  in  either  case.  The  difference  is 


218  Higgledy-Piggledy 

that  if  the  business  man  makes  a  mistake,  he  commonly  has 
to  suffer  for  it,  whereas  it  is  rarely  that  scientific  blundering, 
so  long  as  it  is  confined  to  theory,  entails  loss  on  the  blunderer. 
On  the  contrary  it  very  often  brings  him  fame,  money  and  a 
pension.  Hence  the  business  man,  if  he  is  a  good  one,  will 
take  greater  care  not  to  overdo  or  underdo  things  than  the 
scientific  man  can  reasonably  be  expected  to  take. 

Scientists 

There  are  two  classes,  those  who  want  to  know  and  do 
not  care  whether  others  think  they  know  or  not,  and  those 
who  do  not  much  care  about  knowing  but  care  very  greatly 
about  being  reputed  as  knowing. 

Scientific  Terminology 

This  is  the  Scylla's  cave  which  men  of  science  are  preparing 
for  themselves  to  be  able  to  pounce  out  upon  us  from  it,  and 
into  which  we  cannot  penetrate. 

Scientists  and  Drapers 

Why  should  the  botanist,  geologist  or  other-ist  give  him- 
self such  airs  over  the  draper's  assistant?  Is  it  because 
he  names  his  plants  or  specimens  with  Latin  names  and 
divides  them  into  genera  and  species,  whereas  the  draper 
does  not  formulate  his  classifications,  or  at  any  rate  only 
uses  his  mother  tongue  when  he  does?  Yet  how  like  the 
sub-divisions  of  textile  life  are  to  those  of  the  animal  and 
vegetable  kingdoms !  A  few  great  families — cotton,  linen, 
hempen,  woollen,  silk,  mohair,  alpaca — into  what  an  infinite 
variety  of  genera  and  species  do  not  these  great  families 
subdivide  themselves?  And  does  it  take  less  labour,  with 
less  intelligence,  to  master  all  these  and  to  acquire  familiarity 
with  their  various  habits,  habitats  and  prices  than  it  does 
to  master  the  details  of  any  other  great  branch  of  science? 
I  do  not  know.  But  when  I  think  of  Shoolbred's  on  the  one 
hand  and,  say,  the  ornithological  collections  of  the  British 
Museum  upon  the  other,  I  feel  as  though  it  would  take  me 
less  trouble  to  master  the  second  than  the  first. 


Higgledy-Piggledy  219 

Men  of  Science 

If  they  are  worthy  of  the  name  they  are  indeed  about  God's 
path  and  about  his  bed  and  spying  out  all  his  ways. 

Sparks 

Everything  matters  more  than  we  think  it  does,  and,  at 
the  same  time,  nothing  matters  so  much  as  we  think  it  does. 
The  merest  spark  may  set  all  Europe  in  a  blaze,  but  though 
all  Europe  be  set  in  a  blaze  twenty  times  over,  the  world  will 
wag  itself  right  again. 

Dumb-Bells 
I  regard  them  with  suspicion  as  academic. 

Purgatory 
Time  is  the  only  true  purgatory. 

Greatness 
Hie  is  greatest  who  is  most  often  in  men's  good  thoughts. 

The  Vanity  of  Human  Wishes 

There  is  only  one  thing  vainer  and  that  is  the  having  no 
wishes. 

Jones's  Conscience 

He  said  he  had  not  much  conscience,  and  what  little  he 
had  was  guilty. 

Nihilism 

The  Nihilists  do  not  believe  in  nothing;  they  only  believe 
in  nothing  that  does  not  commend  itself  to  themselves ; 
that  is,  they  will  not  allow  that  anything  may  be  beyond 
their  comprehension.  As  their  comprehension  is  not  great 
their  creed  is,  after  all,  very  nearly  nihil. 


220  Higgledy-Piggledy 

On  Breaking  Habits 

To  begin  knocking  off  the  habit  in  the  evening,  then 
the  afternoon  as  well  and,  finally,  the  morning  too  is  better 
than  to  begin  cutting  it  off  in  the  morning  and  then  go  on 
to  the  afternoon  and  evening.  I  speak  from  experience  as 
regards  smoking  and  can  say  that  when  one  comes  to  within 
an  hour  or  two  of  smoke-time  one  begins  to  be  impatient  for 
it,  whereas  there  will  be  no  impatience  after  the  time  for 
knocking  off  has  been  confirmed  as  a  habit. 

Dogs 

The  great  pleasure  of  a  dog  is  that  you  may  make  a  fool 
of  yourself  with  him  and  not  only  will  he  not  scold  you,  but 
he  will  make  a  fool  of  himself  too. 

Future  and  Past 

The  Will-be  and  the  Has-been  touch  us  more  nearly  than 
the  Is.  So  we  are  more  tender  towards  children  and  old 
people  than  to  those  who  are  in  the  prime  of  life. 

Nature 

As  the  word  is  now  commonly  used  it  excludes  nature's 
most  interesting  productions — the  works  of  man.  Nature 
is  usually  taken  to  mean  mountains,  rivers,  clouds  and  un- 
domesticated  animals  and  plants.  I  am  not  indifferent  to 
this  half  of  nature,  but  it  interests  me  much  less  than  the 
other  half. 

Lucky  and  Unlucky 

People  are  lucky  and  unlucky  not  according  to  what  they 
get  absolutely,  but  according  to  the  ratio  between  what  they 
get  and  what  they  have  been  led  to  expect. 

Definitions 

i 

As,  no  matter  what  cunning  system  of  checks  we  devise, 
we  must  in  the  end  trust  some  one  whom  we  do  not  check, 


Higgledy-Piggledy  221 

but  to  whom  we  give  unreserved  confidence,  so  there  is  a 
point  at  which  the  understanding  and  mental  processes  must 
be  taken  as  understood  without  further  question  or  definition 
in  words.  And  I  should  say  that  this  point  should  be  fixed 
pretty  early  in  the  discussion. 

•  • 

11 

There  is  one  class  of  mind  that  loves  to  lean  on  rules  and 
definitions,  and  another  that  discards  them  as  far  as  possible. 
A  faddist  will  generally  ask  for  a  definition  of  faddism,  and 
one  who  is  not  a  faddist  will  be  impatient  of  being  asked  to 
give  one. 

iii 

A  definition  is  the  enclosing  a  wilderness  of  idea  within  a 
wall  of  words. 

iv 

Definitions  are  a  kind  of  scratching  and  generally  leave  a 
sore  place  more  sore  than  it  was  before. 


As  Love  is  too  young  to  know  what  conscience  is,  so  Truth 
and  Genius  are  too  old  to  know  what  definition  is. 


Money 

It  has  such  an  inherent  power  to  run  itself  clear  of  taint 
that  human  ingenuity  cannot  devise  the  means  of  making 
it  work  permanent  mischief,  any  more  than  means  can  be 
found  of  torturing  people  beyond  what  they  can  bear.  Even 
if  a  man  founds  a  College  of  Technical  Instruction,  the 
chances  are  ten  to  one  that  no  one  will  be  taught  anything 
and  that  it  will  have  been  practically  left  to  a  number  of 
excellent  professors  who  will  know  very  well  what  to  do 
with  it. 

Wit 

There  is  no  Professor  of  Wit  at  either  University.  Surely 
they  might  as  reasonably  have  a  professor  of  wit  as  of 
poetry. 


222  Higgledy-Piggledy 

Oxford  and  Cambridge 

The  dons  are  too  busy  educating  the  young  men  to  be 
able  to  teach  them  anything. 

Cooking 

There  is  a  higher  average  of  good  cooking  at  Oxford  and 
Cambridge  than  elsewhere.  The  cooking  is  better  than  the 
curriculum.  But  there  is  no  Chair  of  Cookery,  it  is  taught  by 
apprenticeship  in  the  kitchens. 

Perseus  and  St.  George 

These  dragon-slayers  did  not  take  lessons  in  dragon- 
slaying,  nor  do  leaders  of  forlorn  hopes  generally  rehearse 
their  parts  beforehand.  Small  things  may  be  rehearsed, 
but  the  greatest  are  always  do-or-die,  neck-or-nothing 
matters. 

Specialism  and  Generalism 

Woe  to  the  specialist  who  is  not  a  pretty  fair  generalist, 
and  woe  to  the  generalist  who  is  not  also  a  bit  of  a  specialist. 

Silence  and  Tact 

Silence  is  not  always  tact  and  it  is  tact  that  is  golden,  not 
silence. 

Truth-tellers 

Professional  truth-tellers  may  be  trusted  to  profess  that 
they  are  telling  the  truth. 

Street  Preachers 

These  are  the  costermongers  and  barrow  men  of  the  re- 
ligious world. 


Higgledy-Piggledy  223 


Providence  and  Othello 

Providence,  in  making  the  rain  fall  also  upon  the  sea, 
was  like  the  man  who,  when  he  was  to  play  Othello,  must 
needs  black  himself  all  over. 


Providence  and  Improvidence 
i 

We  should  no  longer  say:  Put  your  trust  in  Providence, 
but  in  Improvidence,  for  this  is  what  we  mean. 

ii 

To  put  one's  trust  in  God  is  only  a  longer  way  of  saying 
that  one  will  chance  it. 

iii 

There  is  nothing  so  imprudent  or  so  improvident  as  over- 
prudence  or  over-providence. 

Epiphany 

If  Providence  could  be  seen  at  all,  he  would  probably 
turn  out  to  be  a  very  disappointing  person — a  little  wizened 
old  gentleman  with  a  cold  in  his  head,  a  red  nose  and  a  com- 
forter round  his  neck,  whistling  o'er  the  furrow'd  land  or 
crooning  to  himself  as  he  goes  aimlessly  along  the  streets, 
poking  his  way  about  and  loitering  continually  at  shop- 
windows  and  second-hand  book-stalls. 

Fortune 

Like  Wisdom,  Fortune  crieth  in  the  streets,  and  no  man 
regardeth.  There  is  not  an  advertisement  supplement  to 
the  Times — nay,  hardly  a  half  sheet  of  newspaper  that  comes 
into  a  house  wrapping  up  this  or  that,  but  it  gives  informa- 
tion which  would  make  a  man's  fortune,  if  he  could  only 
spot  it  and  detect  the  one  paragraph  that  would  do  this 
among  the  99  which  would  wreck  him  if  he  had  anything 
to  do  with  them. 


224  Higgledy-Piggledy 

Gold- Mines 

Gold  is  not  found  in  quartz  alone ;  its  richest  lodes  are  in 
the  eyes  and  ears  of  the  public,  but  these  are  harder  to  work 
and  to  prospect  than  any  quartz  vein. 

Things  and  Purses 

Everything  is  like  a  purse — there  may  be  money  in  it, 
and  we  can  generally  say  by  the  feel  of  it  whether  there  is 
or  is  not.  Sometimes,  however,  we  must  turn  it  inside  out 
before  we  can  be  quite  sure  whether  there  is  anything  in  it 
or  no.  When  I  have  turned  a  proposition  inside  out,  put 
it  to  stand  on  its  head,  and  shaken  it,  I  have  often  been 
surprised  to  find  how  much  came  out  of  it. 

Solomon  in  all  his  Glory 

But,  in  the  first  place,  the  lilies  do  toil  and  spin  after  their 
own  fashion,  and,  in  the  next,  it  was  not  desirable  that 
Solomon  should  be  dressed  like  a  lily  of  the  valley. 

David's  Teachers 

David  said  he  had  more  understanding  than  his  teachers. 
If  his  teachers  were  anything  like  mine  this  need  not  imply 
much  understanding  on  David's  part.  And  if  his  teachers 
did  not  know  more  than  the  Psalms — it  is  absurd.  It  is 
merely  swagger,  like  the  German  Emperor.  [1897.] 

S.  Michael 

He  contended  with  the  devil  about  the  body  of  Moses. 
Now,  I  do  not  believe  that  any  reasonable  person  would 
contend  about  the  body  of  Moses  with  the  devil  or  with  any 
one  else. 

One  Form  of  Failure 

From  a  worldly  point  of  view  there  is  no  mistake  so  great 
as  that  of  being  always  right. 


Higgledy-Piggledy  225 


Andromeda 

The  dragon  was  never  in  better  health  and  spirits  than 
on  the  morning  when  Perseus  came  down  upon  him.  It 
is  said  that  Adromeda  told  Perseus  she  had  been  thinking 
how  remarkably  well  he  was  looking.  He  had  got  up  quite 
in  his  usual  health — and  so  on. 

When  I  said  this  to  Ballard  [a  fellow  art-student  at 
Heatherley's]  and  that  other  thing  which  I  said  about  Andro- 
meda in  Life  and  Habit*  he  remarked  that  he  wished  it  had 
been  so  in  the  poets. 

I  looked  at  him.  "Ballard,"  I  said,  "I  also  am  'the 
poets.' " 

Self-Confidence 

Nothing  is  ever  any  good  unless  it  is  thwarted  with  self- 
distrust  though  in  the  main  self-confident. 

Wandering 

When  the  inclination  is  not  obvious,  the  mind  meanders, 
or  maunders,  as  a  stream  in  a  flat  meadow. 

Poverty 

I  shun  it  because  I  have  found  it  so  apt  to  become  con- 
tagious ;  but  I  fancy  my  constitution  is  more  seasoned  against 
it  now  than  formerly.  I  hope  that  what  I  have  gone  through 
may  have  made  me  immune. 

Pedals  or  Drones 

The  discords  of  every  age  are  rendered  possible  by  being 
taken  on  a  drone  or  pedal  of  cant,  common  form  and  con- 
ventionality. This  drone  is,  as  it  were,  the  flour  and  suet 
of  a  plum  pudding. 

*  "So,  again,  it  is  said  that  when  Andromeda  and  Perseus  had 
travelled  but  a  little  way  from  the  rock  where  Andromeda  had  so 
long  been  chained,  she  began  upbraiding  him  with  the  loss  of  her 
dragon  who,  on  the  whole,  she  said,  had  been  very  good  to  her.  The 
only  things  we  really  hate  are  unfamiliar  things."  Life  &  Habit, 
Chapter  VIII,  p.  138/9. 


226  Higgledy-Piggledy 


Evasive  Nature 

She  is  one  long  This-way-and-it-isness  and,  at  the  same 
time,  That-way-and-it-isn'tness.  She  flies  so  like  a  snipe  that 
she  is  hard  to  hit. 

Fashion 

Fashion  is  like  God,  man  cannot  see  it  in  its  holy  of  holies 
and  live.  And  it  is,  like  God,  increate,  springing  out  of 
nothing,  yet  the  maker  of  all  things — ever  changing  yet 
the  same  yesterday,  to-day  and  for  ever. 

Doctors  and  Clergymen 

A  physician's  physiology  has  much  the  same  relation  to 
his  power  of  healing  as  a  cleric's  divinity  has  to  his  power  of 
influencing  conduct. 

God  is  Love 
I  dare  say.    But  what  a  mischievous  devil  Love  is! 

Common  Chords 

If  Man  is  the  tonic  and  God  the  dominant,  the  Devil  is 
certainly  the  sub-dominant  and  Woman  is  the  relative  minor. 

God  and  the  Devil 

God  and  the  Devil  are  an  effort  after  specialisation  and 
division  of  labour. 

Sex 

The  sexes  are  the  first — or  are  among  the  first  great  ex- 
periments in  the  social  subdivision  of  labour. 

Women 

If  you  choose  to  insist  on  the  analogies  and  points  of 
resemblance  between  men  and  women,  they  are  so  great 
that  the  differences  seem  indeed  small.  If,  on  the  other  hand, 
you  are  in  a  mood  for  emphasising  the  points  of  difference, 


Higgledy-Piggledy  227 

you  can  show  that  men  and  women  have  hardly  anything 
in  common.  And  so  with  anything :  if  a  man  wants  to  make 
a  case  he  can  generally  find  a  way  of  doing  so. 

Offers  of  Marriage 

Wbmen  sometimes  say  that  they  have  had  no  offers,  and 
only  wish  that  some  one  had  ever  proposed  to  them.  This 
is  not  the  right  way  to  put  it.  What  they  should  say  is 
that  though,  like  all  women,  they  have  been  proposing  to  men 
all  their  lives,  yet  they  grieve  to  remember  that  they  have 
been  invariably  refused. 

Marriage 

i 

The  question  of  marriage  or  non-marriage  is  only  the 
question  of  whether  it  is  better  to  be  spoiled  one  way  or 
another. 

ii 
In  matrimony,  to  hesitate  is  sometimes  to  be  saved. 

iii 

Inoculation,  or  a  hair  of  the  dog  that  is  going  to  bite  you — 
this  principle  should  be  introduced  in  respect  of  marriage 
and  speculation. 

Life  and  Love 

To  live  is  like  to  love — all  reason  is  against  it,  and  all 
healthy  instinct  for  it. 

The  Basis  of  Life 
We  may  say  what  we  will,  but  Life  is,  au  fond,  sensual. 

Woman  Suffrage 

I  will  vote  for  it  when  women  have  left  off  making  a  noise 
in  the  reading-room  of  the  British  Museum,  when  they  leave 
off  wearing  high  head-dresses  in  the  pit  of  a  theatre  and 
when  I  have  seen  as  many  as  twelve  women  in  all  catch  hold 
of  the  strap  or  bar  on  getting  into  an  omnibus. 


228  Higgledy-Piggledy 

Manners  Makyth  Man 
Yes,  but  they  make  woman  still  more. 

Women  and  Religion 

It  has  been  said  that  all  sensible  men  are  of  the  same 
religion  and  that  no  sensible  man  ever  says  what  that  religion 
is.  So  all  sensible  men  are  of  the  same  opinion  about  women 
and  no  sensible  man  ever  says  what  that  opinion  is. 

Happiness 

Behold  and  see  if  there  be  any  happiness  like  unto  the  hap- 
piness of  the  devils  when  they  found  themselves  cast  out 
of  Mary  Magdalene. 

Sorrow  within  Sorrow 

He  was  in  reality  damned  glad;  he  told  people  he  was 
sorry  he  was  not  more  sorry,  and  here  began  the  first  genuine 
sorrow,  for  he  was  really  sorry  that  people  would  not  believe 
he  was  sorry  that  he  was  not  more  sorry. 

Going  Away 

I  can  generally  bear  the  separation,  but  I  don't  like  the 
leave-taking. 


XV 
Titles  and  Subjects 


Titles 

A  GOOD  title  should  aim  at  making  what  follows  as  far  as 
possible  superfluous  to  those  who  know  anything  of  the 
subject. 

"The  Ancient  Mariner" 

This  poem  would  not  have  taken  so  well  if  it  had  been 
called  "The  Old  Sailor,"  so  that  Wardour  Street  has  its 
uses. 

For  Unwritten  Articles,  Essays,  Stories 

The  Art  of  Quarrelling. 

Christian  Death-beds. 

The  Book  of  Babes  and  Sucklings. 

Literary  Struldbrugs. 

The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

The  Limits  of  Good  Faith. 

Art,  Money  and  Religion. 

The  Third  Class  Excursion  Train,  or  Steam-boat,  as  the 
Church  of  the  Future. 

The  Utter  Speculation  involved  in  much  of  the  good  advice 
that  is  commonly  given — as  never  to  sell  a  reversion,  etc. 

Tracts  for  Children,  warning  them  against  the  virtues  of 
their  elders. 

Making  Ready  for  Death  as  a  Means  of  Prolonging  Life. 

An  Essay  concerning  Human  Misunderstanding.  So  Mc- 
Culloch  [a  fellow  art-student  at  Heatherley's,  a  very  fine 
draughtsman]  used  to  say  that  he  drew  a  great  many  lines 
and  saved  the  best  of  them.  Illusion,  mistake,  action  taken 

229 


230  Titles  and  Subjects 

in  the  dark — these  are  among  the  main  sources  of  our  prog- 
ress. 

The  Elements  of  Immorality  for  the  Use  of  Earnest 
Schoolmasters. 

Family  Prayers :  A  series  of  perfectly  plain  and  sensible 
ones  asking  for  what  people  really  do  want  without  any  kind 
of  humbug. 

A  Penitential  Psalm  as  David  would  have  written  it  if  he 
had  been  reading  Herbert  Spencer. 

A  Few  Little  Crows  which  I  have  to  pick  with  various 
people. 

The  Scylla  of  Atheism  and  the  Charybdis  of  Christianity. 

The  Battle  of  the  Prigs  and  Blackguards. 

That  Good  may  Come. 

The  Marriage  of  Inconvenience. 

The  Judicious  Separation. 

Fooling  Around. 

Higgledy-Piggledy. 

The  Diseases  and  Ordinary  Causes  of  Mortality  among 
Friendships. 

The  finding  a  lot  of  old  photographs  at  Herculaneum  or 
Thebes ;  and  they  should  turn  out  to  be  of  no  interest. 

On  the  points  of  resemblance  and  difference  between  the 
dropping  off  of  leaves  from  a  tree  and  the  dropping  off  of 
guests  from  a  dinner  or  a  concert. 

The  Sense  of  Touch :  An  essay  showing  that  all  the  senses 
resolve  themselves  ultimately  into  a  sense  of  touch,  and 
that  eating  is  touch  carried  to  the  bitter  end.  So  there  is 
but  one  sense — touch — and  the  amoeba  has  it.  When  I  look 
upon  the  foraminifera  I  look  upon  myself. 

The  China  Shepherdess  with  Lamb  on  public-house  chim- 
ney-pieces in  England  as  against  the  Virgin  with  Child  in 
Italy. 

For  a  Medical  pamphlet:  Cant  as  a  means  of  Prolonging 
Life. 

For  an  Art  book:  The  Complete  Pot-boiler;  or  what  to 
paint  and  how  to  paint  it,  with  illustrations  reproduced  from 
contemporary  exhibitions  and  explanatory  notes. 

For  a  Picture:  St.  Francis  preaching  to  Silenus.  Fra 
Angelico  and  Rubens  might  collaborate  to  produce  this  pic- 
ture. 


Titles  and  Subjects  231 

The  Happy  Mistress.  Fifteen  mistresses  apply  for  three 
cooks  and  the  mistress  who  thought  herself  nobody  is  chosen 
by  the  beautiful  and  accomplished  cook. 

The  Complete  Drunkard.  He  would  not  give  money  to 
sober  people,  he  said  they  would  only  eat  it  and  send  their 
children  to  school  with  it. 

The  Contented  Porpoise.  It  knew  it  was  to  be  stuffed 
and  set  up  in  a  glass  case  after  death,  and  looked  forward 
to  this  as  to  a  life  of  endless  happiness. 

The  Flying  Balance.  The  ghost  of  an  old  cashier  haunts 
a  ledger,  so  that  the  books  always  refuse  to  balance  by  the 
sum  of,  say,  £1.15.11.  No  matter  how  many  accountants 
are  called  in,  year  after  year  the  same  error  always  turns 
up;  sometimes  they  think  they  have  it  right  and  it  turns 
out  there  was  a  mistake,  so  the  old  error  reappears.  At 
last  a  son  and  heir  is  born,  and  at  some  festivities  the 
old  cashier's  name  is  mentioned  with  honour.  This  lays 
his  ghost.  Next  morning  the  books  are  found  correct  and 
remain  so. 

A  Dialogue  between  Isaac  and  Ishmael  on  the  night  that 
Isaac  came  down  from  the  mountain  with  his  father.  The 
rebellious  Ishmael  tries  to  stir  up  Isaac,  and  that  good  young 
man  explains  the  righteousness  of  the  transaction — without 
much  effect. 

Bad  Habits:  on  the  dropping  them  gradually,  as  one 
leaves  off  requiring  them,  on  the  evolution  principle. 

A  Story  about  a  Freethinking  Father  who  has  an  illegiti- 
mate son  which  he  considers  the  proper  thing;  he  finds  this 
son  taking  to  immoral  ways,  e.g.  he  turns  Christian,  becomes 
a  clergyman  and  insists  on  marrying. 

For  a  Ballad :  Two  sets  of  rooms  in  some  alms-houses 
at  Cobham  near  Gravesend  have  an  inscription  stating  that 
they  belong  to  "the  Hundred  of  Hoo  in  the  Isle  of 
Grain."  These  words  would  make  a  lovely  refrain  for  a 
ballad. 

A  story  about  a  man  who  suffered  from  atrophy  of  the 
purse,  or  atrophy  of  the  opinions;  but  whatever  the  disease 
some  plausible  Latin,  or  imitation-Latin  name  must  be  found 
for  it  and  also  some  cure. 

A  Fairy  Story  modelled  on  the  Ugly  Duckling  of  Hans 
Andersen  about  a  bumptious  boy  whom  all  the  nice  boys 


232  Titles  and  Subjects 

hated.  He  finds  out  that  he  was  really  at  last  caressed  by 
the  Huxleys  and  Tyndalls  as  one  of  themselves. 

A  Collection  of  the  letters  of  people  who  have  committed 
suicide;  and  also  of  people  who  only  threaten  to  do  so. 
The  first  may  be  got  abundantly  from  reports  of  coroners' 
inquests,  the  second  would  be  harder  to  come  by. 

The  Structure  and  Comparative  Anatomy  of  Fads,  Fancies 
and  Theories;  showing,  moreover,  that  men  and  women 
exist  only  as  the  organs  and  tools  of  the  ideas  that  dominate 
them;  it  is  the  fad  that  is  alone  living. 

An  Astronomical  Speculation :  Each  fixed  star  has  a 
separate  god  whose  body  is  his  own  particular  solar  system, 
and  these  gods  know  each  other,  move  about  among  each 
other  as  we  do,  laugh  at  each  other  and  criticise  one  another's 
work.  Write  some  of  their  discourses  with  and  about  one 
another. 

Imaginary  Worlds 

A  world  exactly,  to  the  minutest  detail,  a  duplicate  of 
our  own,  but  as  we  shall  be  five  hundred,  or  from  that 
to  twenty  thousand,  years  hence.  Let  there  be  also 
another  world,  a  duplicate  of  what  we  were  five  hundred 
to  twenty  thousand  years  ago.  There  should  be  many 
worlds  of  each  kind  at  different  dates  behind  us  and  ahead 
of  us. 

I  send  a  visitor  from  a  world  ahead  of  us  to  a  world  behind 
us,  after  which  he  comes  to  us,  and  so  we  learn  what  happened 
in  the  Homeric  age.  My  visitor  will  not  tell  me  what  has 
happened  in  his  own  world  since  the  time  corresponding  to 
the  present  moment  in  our  world,  because  the  knowledge 
of  the  future  would  be  not  only  fatal  to  ourselves  but  would 
upset  the  similarity  between  the  two  worlds,  so  they  would 
be  no  longer  able  to  refer  to  us  for  information  on  any  point 
of  history  from  the  moment  of  the  introduction  of  the  dis- 
turbing element. 

When  they  are  in  doubt  about  a  point  in  their  past  history 
that  we  have  not  yet  reached  they  make  preparation  and 
forecast  its  occurrence  in  our  world  as  we  foretell  eclipses 
and  transits  of  Venus,  and  all  their  most  accomplished  his- 
torians investigate  it;  but  if  the  conditions  for  observation 
have  been  unfavourable,  or  if  they  postpone  consideration 


Titles  and  Subjects  233 

of  the  point  till  the  time  of  its  happening  here  has  gone  by, 
then  they  must  wait  for  many  years  till  the  same  combination 
occurs  in  some  other  world.  Thus  they  say,  "The  next 
beheading  of  King  Charles  I  will  be  in  Aid.  b.  x.  231  a" — or 
whatever  the  name  of  the  star  may  be — "on  such  and  such 
a  day  of  such  and  such  a  year,  and  there  will  not  be  another 
in  the  lifetime  of  any  man  now  living,"  or  there  will,  in  such 
and  such  a  star,  as  the  case  may  be. 

Communication  with  a  world  twenty  thousand  years  ahead 
of  us  might  ruin  the  human  race  as  effectually  as  if  we  had 
fallen  into  the  sun.  It  would  be  too  wide  a  cross.  The 
people  in  my  supposed  world  know  this  and  if,  for  any  reason, 
they  want  to  kill  a  civilisation,  stuff  it  and  put  it  into  a 
museum,  they  tell  it  something  that  is  too  much  ahead  of 
its  other  ideas,  something  that  travels  faster  than  thought, 
thus  setting  an  avalanche  of  new  ideas  tumbling  in  upon 
it  and  utterly  destroying  everything.  Sometimes  they 
merely  introduce  a  little  poisonous  microbe  of  thought 
which  the  cells  in  the  world  where  it  is  introduced  do  not 
know  how  to  deal  with — some  such  trifle  as  that  two  and 
two  make  seven,  or  that  you  can  weigh  time  in  scales  by 
the  pound;  a  single  such  microbe  of  knowledge  placed  in 
the  brain  of  a  fitting  subject  would  breed  like  wild  fire  and 
kill  all  that  came  in  contact  with  it. 

And  so  on. 

An  Idyll 

I  knew  a  South  Italian  of  the  old  Greek  blood  whose 
sister  told  him  when  he  was  a  boy  that  he  had  eyes  like  a 
cow. 

Raging  with  despair  and  grief  he  haunted  the  fountains 
and  looked  into  the  mirror  of  their  waters.  "Are  my  eyes," 
he  asked  himself  with  horror,  "are  they  really  like  the  eyes 
of  a  cow?"  "Alas!"  he  was  compelled  to  answer,  "they 
are  only  too  sadly,  sadly  like  them." 

And  he  asked  those  of  his  playmates  whom  he  best  knew 
and  trusted  whether  it  was  indeed  true  that  his  eyes  were 
like  the  eyes  of  a  cow,  but  he  got  no  comfort  from  any  of 
them,  for  they  one  and  all  laughed  at  him  and  said  that  they 
were  not  only  like,  but  very  like.  Then  grief  consumed  his 


234  Titles  and  Subjects 

soul,  and  he  could  eat  no  food,  till  one  day  the  loveliest  girl 
in  the  place  said  to  him: 

"Gaetano,  my  grandmother  is  ill  and  cannot  get  her  fire- 
wood ;  come  with  me  to  the  bosco  this  evening  and  help  me 
to  bring  her  a  load  or  two,  will  you?" 

And  he  said  he  would  go. 

So  when  the  sun  was  well  down  and  the  cool  night  air 
was  sauntering  under  the  chestnuts,  the  pair  sat  together 
cheek  to  cheek  and  with  their  arms  round  each  other's 
waists. 

"O  Gaetano,"  she  exclaimed,  "I  do  love  you  so  very 
dearly.  When  you  look  at  me  your  eyes  are  like — they  are 
like  the  eyes" — here  she  faltered  a  little — "the  eyes  of  a 
cow." 

Thenceforward  he  cared  not.  .  .  . 

And  so  on. 

A  Divorce  Novelette 

The  hero  and  heroine  are  engaged  against  their  wishes. 
They  like  one  another  very  well  but  each  is  in  love  with 
some  one  else;  nevertheless,  under  an  uncle's  will,  they 
forfeit  large  property  unless  they  marry  one  another,  so 
they  get  married,  making  no  secret  to  one  another  that  they 
dislike  it  very  much. 

On  the  evening  of  their  wedding  day  they  broach  the 
subject  that  has  long  been  nearest  to  their  hearts — the  pos- 
sibility of  being  divorced.  They  discuss  it  tearfully,  but 
the  obstacles  seem  insuperable.  Nevertheless  they  agree 
that  faint  heart  never  yet  got  rid  of  fair  lady,  "None  but 
the  brave,"  exclaims  the  husband,  "deserve  to  lose  the  fair," 
and  they  plight  their  most  solemn  vows  that  they  will  hence- 
forth live  but  for  the  object  of  getting  divorced  from  one 
another. 

But  the  course  of  true  divorce  never  did  run  smooth,  and 
the  plot  turns  upon  the  difficulties  that  meet  them  and  how 
they  try  to  overcome  them.  At  one  time  they  seem  almost 
certain  of  success,  but  the  cup  is  dashed  from  their  lips 
and  is  farther  off  than  ever. 

At  last  an  opportunity  occurs  in  an  unlooked-for  manner. 
They  are  divorced  and  live  happily  apart  ever  afterwards. 


Titles  and  Subjects  235 

The  Moral  Painter 
A  Tale  of  Double  Personality 

Once  upon  a  time  there  was  a  painter  who  divided  his 
life  into  two  halves;  in  the  one  half  he  painted  pot-boilers 
for  the  market,  setting  every  consideration  aside  except 
that  of  doing  for  his  master,  the  public,  something  for  which 
he  could  get  paid  the  money  on  which  he  lived.  He  was 
great  at  floods  and  never  looked  at  nature  except  in  order 
to  see  what  would  make  most  show  with  least  expense.  On 
the  whole  he  found  nothing  so  cheap  to  make  and  easy  to 
sell  as  veiled  heads. 

The  other  half  of  his  time  he  studied  and  painted  with 
the  sincerity  of  Giovanni  Bellini,  Rembrandt,  Holbein  or 
De  Hooghe.  He  was  then  his  own  master  and  thought 
only  of  doing  his  work  as  well  as  he  could,  regardless  of 
whether  it  would  bring  him  anything  but  debt  and  abuse 
or  not.  He  gave  his  best  without  receiving  so  much  as 
thanks. 

He  avoided  the  temptation  of  telling  either  half  about  the 
other. 

Two  Writers 

One  left  little  or  nothing  about  himself  and  the  world 
complained  that  it  was  puzzled.  Another,  mindful  of  this, 
left  copious  details  about  himself,  whereon  the  world  said 
that  it  was  even  more  puzzled  about  him  than  about  the 
man  who  had  left  nothing,  till  presently  it  found  out  that 
it  was  also  bored,  and  troubled  itself  no  more  about  either. 

The  Archbishop  of  Heligoland 

The  Archbishop  of  Heligoland  believes  his  faith,  and  it 
makes  him  so  unhappy  that  he  finds  it  impossible  to  advise 
any  one  to  accept  it.  He  summons  the  Devil,  makes  a  com- 
pact with  him  and  is  relieved  by  being  made  to  see  that  there 
was  nothing  in  it — whereon  he  is  very  good  and  happy  and 
leads  a  most  beneficent  life,  but  is  haunted  by  the  thought 
that  on  his  death  the  Devil  will  claim  his  bond.  This  terror 


236  Titles  and  Subjects 

grows  greater  and  greater,  and  he  determines  to  see  the  Devil 
again. 

The  upshot  of  it  all  is  that  the  Devil  turns  out  to  have 
been  Christ  who  has  a  dual  life  and  appears  sometimes  as 
Christ  and  sometimes  as  the  Devil.* 

*  Butler  gave  this  as  a  subject  to  Mr.  E.  P.  Larken  who  made  it  into 
a  short  story  entitled  "The  Priest's  Bargain,"  which  appeared  in  the 
Pall  Mall  Magazine,  May,  1897. 


XVI 

Written  Sketches 


Literary  Sketch-Books 

THE  true  writer  will  stop  everywhere  and  anywhere  to  put 
down  his  notes,  as  the  true  painter  will  stop  everywhere  and 
anywhere  to  sketch. 

I  do  not  see  why  an  author  should  not  have  a  sale  of 
literary  sketches,  each  one  short,  slight  and  capable  of  being 
framed  and  glazed  in  small  compass.  They  would  make 
excellent  library  decorations  and  ought  to  fetch  as  much  as 
an  artist's  sketches.  They  might  be  cut  up  in  suitable  lots, 
if  the  fashion  were  once  set,  and  many  a  man  might  be 
making  provision  for  his  family  at  odd  times  with  his  notes 
as  an  artist  does  with  his  sketches. 

London 

If  I  were  asked  what  part  of  London  I  was  most  identified 
with  after  Clifford's  Inn  itself,  I  should  say  Fetter  Lane — 
every  part  of  it.  Just  by  the  Record  Office  is  one  of  the  places 
where  I  am  especially  prone  to  get  ideas ;  so  also  is  the  other 
end,  about  the  butcher's  shop  near  Hblborn.  The  reason  in 
both  cases  is  the  same,  namely,  that  I  have  about  had  time  to 
settle  down  to  reflection  after  leaving,  on  the  one  hand,  my 
rooms  in  Clifford's  Inn,  and,  on  the  other,  Jones's  rooms  in 
Barnard's  Inn  where  I  usually  spend  the  evening.  The  subject 
which  has  occupied  my  mind  during  the  day  being  approached 
anew  after  an  interval  and  a  shake,  some  fresh  idea  in  con- 
nection with  it  often  strikes  me.  But  long  before  I  knew 
Jones,  Fetter  Lane  was  always  a  street  which  I  was  more  in 
than  perhaps  any  other  in  London.  Leather  Lane,  the  road 
through  Lincoln's  Inn  Fields  to  the  Museum,  the  Embank- 
ment, Fleet  Street,  the  Strand  and  Charing  Cross  come  next. 

237 


238  Written  Sketches 

A  Clifford's  Inn  Euphemism 

People  when  they  want  to  get  rid  of  their  cats,  and  do  not 
like  killing  them,  bring  them  to  the  garden  of  Clifford's  Inn, 
drop  them  there  and  go  away.  In  spite  of  all  that  is  said 
about  cats  being  able  to  find  their  way  so  wonderfully,  they 
seldom  do  find  it,  and  once  in  Clifford's  Inn  the  cat  generally 
remains  there.  The  technical  word  among  the  laundresses  in 
the  inn  for  this  is,  "losing"  a  cat : 

"Poor  thing,  poor  thing,"  said  one  old  woman  to  me  a  few 
days  ago,  "it's  got  no  fur  on  its  head  at  all,  and  no  doubt 
that's  why  the  people  she  lived  with  lost  her." 

London  Trees 

They  are  making  a  great  outcry  about  the  ventilators  on 
the  Thames  Embankment,  just  as  they  made  a  great  outcry 
about  the  Griffin  in  Fleet  Street.  [See  Alps  and  Sanctuaries. 
Introduction.]  They  say  the  ventilators  have  spoiled  the 
Thames  Embankment.  They  do  not  spoil  it  half  so  much  as 
the  statues  do — indeed,  I  do  not  see  that  they  spoil  it  at  all. 
The  trees  that  are  planted  everywhere  are,  or  will  be,  a  more 
serious  nuisance.  Trees  are  all  very  well  where  there  is  plenty 
of  room,  otherwise  they  are  a  mistake;  they  keep  in  the 
moisture,  exclude  light  and  air,  and  their  roots  disturb 
foundations ;  most  of  our  London  Squares  would  look  much 
better  if  the  trees  were  thinned.  I  should  like  to  cut  down  all 
the  plane  trees  in  the  garden  of  Clifford's  Inn  and  leave  only 
the  others. 

What  I  Said  to  the  Milkman 

One  afternoon  I  heard  a  knock  at  the  door  and  found  it  was 
the  milkman.  Mrs.  Doncaster  [his  laundress]  was  not  there, 
so  I  took  in  the  milk  myself.  The  milkman  is  a  very  nice 
man,  and,  by  way  of  making  himself  pleasant,  said,  rather 
complainingly,  that  the  weather  kept  very  dry. 

I  looked  at  him  significantly  and  said :  "Ah,  yes,  of  course 
for  your  business  you  must  find  it  very  inconvenient,"  and 
laughed. 

He  saw  he  had  been  caught  and  laughed  too.    It  was  a  very 


Written  Sketches  239 

old  joke,  but  he  had  not  expected  it  at  that  particular  moment, 
and  on  the  top  of  such  an  innocent  remark. 

The  Return  of  the  Jews  to  Palestine 

A  man  called  on  me  last  week  and  proposed  gravely  that  I 
should  write  a  book  upon  an  idea  which  had  occurred  to  a 
friend  of  his,  a  Jew  living  in  New  Bond  Street.  It  was  a  plan 
requiring  the  co-operation  of  a  brilliant  writer  and  that  was 
why  he  had  come  to  me.  If  only  I  would  help,  the  return  of 
the  Jews  to  Palestine  would  be  rendered  certain  and  easy. 
There  was  no  trouble  about  the  poor  Jews,  he  knew  how  he 
could  get  them  back  at  any  time;  the  difficulty  lay  with  the 
Rothschilds,  the  Oppenheims  and  such;  with  my  assistance, 
however,  the  thing  could  be  done. 

I  am  afraid  I  was  rude  enough  to  decline  to  go  into  the 
scheme  on  the  ground  that  I  did  not  care  twopence  whether 
the  Rothschilds  and  Oppenheims  went  back  to  Palestine  or 
not.  This  was  felt  to  be  an  obstacle;  but  then  he  began  to 
try  and  make  me  care,  whereupon,  of  course,  I  had  to  get 
rid  of  him.  [1883.] 

The  Great  Bear's  Barley- Water 

Last  night  Jones  was  walking  down  with  me  from  Staple 
Inn  to  Clifford's  Inn,  about  10  o'clock,  and  we  saw  the  Great 
Bear  standing  upright  on  the  tip  of  his  tail  which  was  coming 
out  of  a  chimney  pot.  Jones  said  it  wanted  attending  to. 
I  said: 

"Yes,  but  to  attend  to  it  properly  we  ought  to  sit  up  with 
it  all  night,  and  if  the  Great  Bear  thinks  that  I  am  going  to  sit 
by  his  bed-side  and  give  him  a  spoonful  of  barley-water  every 
ten  minutes,  he  will  find  himself  much  mistaken."  [1892.] 

The  Cock  Tavern 

I  went  into  Fleet  Street  one  Sunday  morning  last  November 
[  1882]  with  my  camera  lucida  to  see  whether  I  should  like  to 
make  a  sketch  of  the  gap  made  by  the  demolition  of  the  Cock 
Tavern.  It  was  rather  pretty,  with  an  old  roof  or  two  behind 
and  scaffolding  about  and  torn  paper  hanging  to  an  exposed 
party-wall  and  old  fireplaces  and  so  on,  but  it  was  not  very 


240  Written  Sketches 

much  out  of  the  way.  Still  I  would  have  taken  it  if  it  had  not 
been  the  Cock.  I  thought  of  all  the  trash  that  has  been  written 
about  it  and  of  Tennyson's  plump  head  waiter  (who  by  the 
way  used  to  swear  that  he  did  not  know  Tennyson  and  that 
Tennyson  never  did  resort  to  the  Cock)  and  I  said  to  myself : 
"No — you  may  go.  I  will  put  out  no  hand  to  save  you." 

Myself  in  Dowie's  Shop 

I  always  buy  ready-made  boots  and  insist  on  taking  those 
which  the  shopman  says  are  much  too  large  for  me.  By  this 
means  I  keep  free  from  corns,  but  I  have  a  great  deal  of 
trouble  generally  with  the  shopman.  I  had  got  on  a  pair  once 
which  I  thought  would  do,  and  the  shopman  said  for  the  third 
or  fourth  time: 

"But  really,  sir,  these  boots  are  much  too  large  for  you." 

I  turned  to  him  and  said  rather  sternly,  "Now,  you  made 
that  remark  before." 

There  was  nothing  in  it,  but  all  at  once  I  became  aware  that 
I  was  being  watched,  and,  looking  up,  saw  a  middle-aged 
gentleman  eyeing  the  whole  proceedings  with  much  amuse- 
ment. He  was  quite  polite  but  he  was  obviously  exceedingly 
amused.  I  can  hardly  tell  why,  nor  why  I  should  put  such  a 
trifle  down,  but  somehow  or  other  an  impression  was  made 
upon  me  by  the  affair  quite  out  of  proportion  to  that  usually 
produced  by  so  small  a  matter. 

My  Dentist 

Mr.  Forsyth  had  been  stopping  a  tooth  for  me  and  then 
talked  a  little,  as  he  generally  does,  and  asked  me  if  I  knew 
a  certain  distinguished  literary  man,  or  rather  journalist.  I 
said  No,  and  that  I  did  not  want  to  know  him.  The  paper 
edited  by  the  gentleman  in  question  was  not  to  my  taste.  I 
was  a  literary  Ishmael,  and  preferred  to  remain  so.  It  was 
my  role. 

"It  seems  to  me,"  I  continued,  "that  if  a  man  will  only 
be  careful  not  to  write  about  things  that  he  does  not  under- 
stand, if  he  will  use  the  tooth-pick  freely  and  the  spirit  twice 
a  day,  and  come  to  you  again  in  October,  he  will  get  on  very 
well  without  knowing  any  of  the  big-wigs." 


Written  Sketches  241 

"The  tooth-pick  freely"  and  "the  spirit  twice  a  day"  being 
tags  of  Mr.  Forsyth's,  he  laughed. 

Furber  the  Violin-Maker 

From  what  my  cousin  [Reginald  E.  Worsley]  and  Gogin 
both  tell  me  I  am  sure  that  Furber  is  one  of  the  best  men  we 
have.  My  cousin  did  not  like  to  send  Hyam  to  him  for  a 
violin :  he  did  not  think  him  worthy  to  have  one.  Furber 
does  not  want  you  to  buy  a  violin  unless  you  can  appreciate 
it  when  you  have  it.  My  cousin  says  of  him: 

"He  is  generally  a  little  tight  on  a  Saturday  afternoon. 
He  always  speaks  the  truth,  but  on  Saturday  afternoons  it 
comes  pouring  out  more." 

"His  joints  [i.e.  the  joints  of  the  violins  he  makes]  are  the 
closest  and  neatest  that  were  ever  made." 

"He  always  speaks  of  the  corners  of  a  fiddle;  Haweis 
would  call  them  the  points.  Haweis  calls  it  the  neck  of  a 
fiddle.  Furber  always  the  handle." 

My  cousin  says  he  would  like  to  take  his  violins  to  bed 
with  him. 

Speaking  of  Strad  violins  Furber  said :  "Rough,  rough 
linings,  but  they  look  as  if  they  grew  together." 

One  day  my  cousin  called  and  Furber,  on  opening  the  door, 
before  saying  "Hjow  do  you  do?"  or  any  word  of  greeting, 
said  very  quietly: 

"The  dog  is  dead." 

My  cousin,  having  said  what  he  thought  sufficient,  took  up 
a  violin  and  played  a  few  notes.  Furber  evidently  did  not  like 
it.  Rose,  the  dog,  was  still  unburied ;  she  was  laid  out  in  that 
very  room.  My  cousin  stopped.  Then  Mrs.  Furber  came  in. 

R.  E.  W.  "I  am  very  sorry,  Mrs.  Furber,  to  hear  about 
Rose." 

Mrs.  F.  "Well,  yes  sir.  But  I  suppose  it  is  all  for  the  best." 

R.  E.  W.    "I  am  afraid  you  will  miss  her  a  great  deal." 

Mrs.  F.  "No  doubt  we  shall,  sir;  but  you  see  she  is  only 
gone  a  little  while  before  us." 

R.  E.  W.     "Oh,  Mrs.  Furber,  I  hope  a  good  long  while." 

Mrs.  F.  (brightening).  "Well,  yes  sir,  I  don't  want  to  go 
just  yet,  though  Mr.  Furber  does  say  it  is  a  happy  thing  to 
die." 


242  Written  Sketches 

My  cousin  says  that  Furber  hardly  knows  any  one  by  their 
real  name.  He  identifies  them  by  some  nickname  in  connec- 
tion with  the  fiddles  they  buy  from  him  or  get  him  to  repair, 
or  by  some  personal  peculiarity. 

"There  is  one  man,"  said  my  cousin,  "whom  he  calls 
'diaphragm'  because  he  wanted  a  fiddle  made  with  what  he 
called  a  diaphragm  in  it.  He  knows  Dando  and  Carrodus  and 
Jenny  Lind,  but  hardly  any  one  else." 

"Who  is  Dando?"  said  I. 

"Why,  Dando?  Not  know  Dando?  He  was  George  the 
Fourth's  music  master,  and  is  now  one  of  the  oldest  members 
of  the  profession." 

Window  Cleaning  in  the  British  Museum 
Reading-Room 

Once  a  year  or  so  the  figures  on  the  Assyrian  bas-reliefs 
break  adrift  and  may  be  seen,  with  their  scaling  ladders  and 
all,  cleaning  the  outside  of  the  windows  in  the  dome  of  the 
reading-room.  It  is  very  pretty  to  watch  them  and  they 
would  photograph  beautifully.  If  I  live  to  see  them  do  it 
again  I  must  certainly  snapshot  them.  You  can  see  them 
smoking  and  sparring,  and  this  year  they  have  left  a  little 
hole  in  the  window  above  the  clock. 

The  Electric  Light  in  its  Infancy 

I  heard  a  woman  in  a  'bus  boring  her  lover  about  the 
electric  light.  She  wanted  to  know  this  and  that,  and  the 
poor  lover  was  helpless.  Then  she  said  she  wanted  to  know 
how  it  was  regulated.  At  last  she  settled  down  by  saying 
that  she  knew  it  was  in  its  infancy.  The  word  "infancy" 
seemed  to  have  a  soothing  effect  upon  her,  for  she  said  no 
more  but,  leaning  her  head  against  her  lover's  shoulder,  com- 
posed herself  to  slumber. 

Fire 

I  was  at  one  the  other  night  and  heard  a  man  say :  "That 
corner  stack  is  alight  now  quite  nicely."  People's  sympathies 
seem  generally  to  be  with  the  fire  so  long  as  no  one  is  in 
danger  of  being  burned. 


Written  Sketches  1243 

Adam  and  Eve 

A  little  boy  and  a  little  girl  were  looking  at  a  picture  of 
Adam  and  Eve. 

"Which  is  Adam  and  which  is  Eve  ?"  said  one. 

"I  do  not  know,"  said  the  other,  "but  I  could  tell  if  they 
had  their  clothes  on." 

Does  Mamma  Know? 

A  father  was  telling  his  eldest  daughter,  aged  about  six, 
that  she  had  a  little  sister,  and  was  explaining  to  her  how  nice 
it  all  was.  The  child  said  it  was  delightful  and  added: 

"Does  Mamma  know  ?    Let's  go  and  tell  her." 

Mr.  Darwin  in  the  Zoological  Gardens 

Frank  Darwin  told  me  his  father  was  once  standing  near 
the  hippopotamus  cage  when  a  little  boy  and  girl,  aged  four 
and  five,  came  up.  The  hippopotamus  shut  his  eyes  for  a 
minute. 

"That  bird's  dead,"  said  the  little  girl ;  "come  along." 

Terbourg 

Gogin  told  me  that  Berg,  an  impulsive  Swede  whom  he  had 
known  in  Laurens's  studio  in  Paris  and  who  painted  very 
well,  came  to  London  and  was  taken  by  an  artist  friend 
[Henry  Scott  Tuke,  A.R.A.]  to  the  National  Gallery  where  he 
became  very  enthusiastic  about  the  Terbourgs.  They  then 
went  for  a  walk  and,  in  Kensington  Gore,  near  one  of  the 
entrances  to  Hyde  Park  or  Kensington  Gardens,  there  was 
an  old  Irish  apple-woman  sitting  with  her  feet  in  a  basket, 
smoking  a  pipe  and  selling  oranges. 

"Arranges  two  a  penny,  sorr,"  said  the  old  woman  in  a 
general  way. 

And  Berg,  turning  to  her  and  throwing  out  his  hands 
appealingly,  said : 

"O,  madame,  avez-vous  vu  les  Terbourgs?  Allez  voir  les 
Terbourgs." 

He  felt  that  such  a  big  note  had  been  left  out  of  the  life  of 
any  one  who  had  not  seen  them. 


244  Written  Sketches 


At  Doctors'  Commons 

A  woman  once  stopped  me  at  the  entrance  to  Doctors' 
Commons  and  said : 

."If  you  please,  sir,  can  you  tell  me — is  this  the  place  that 
I  came  to  before?" 

Not  knowing  where  she  had  been  before  I  could  not  tell  her. 

The  Sack  of  Khartoum 

As  I  was  getting  out  of  a  'bus  the  conductor  said  to  me  in  a 
confidential  tone : 

"I  say,  what  does  that  mean  ?  'Sack  of  Khartoum'  ?  What 
does  'Sack  of  Khartoum'  mean?" 

"It  means,"  said  I,  "that  they've  taken  Khartoum  and 
played  hell  with  it  all  round." 

He  understood  that  and  thanked  me,  whereon  we  parted. 

Missolonghi 

Ballard  [a  fellow  art-student  with  Butler  at  Heatherley's] 
told  me  that  an  old  governess,  some  twenty  years  since,  was 
teaching  some  girls  modern  geography.  One  of  them  did 
not  know  the  name  Missolonghi.  The  old  lady  wrung  her 
hands :  ( 

"Why,  me  dear,"  she  exclaimed,  "when  I  was  your  age  I 
could  never  hear  the  name  mentioned  without  bursting  into 
tears." 

I  should  perhaps  add  that  Byron  died  there. 

Memnon 

I  saw  the  driver  of  the  Hampstead  'bus  once,  near  St. 
Giles's  Church — an  old,  fat,  red-faced  man  sitting  bolt  up- 
right on  the  top  of  his  'bus  in  a  driving  storm  of  snow,  fast 
asleep  with  a  huge  waterproof  over  his  great-coat  which 
descended  with  sweeping  lines  on  to  a  tarpaulin.  All  this  rose 
out  of  a  cloud  of  steam  from  the  horses.  Hb  had  a  short  clay 
pipe  in  his  mouth  but,  for  the  moment,  he  looked  just  like 
Memnon. 


Written  Sketches  245 


Manzi  the  Model 

They  had  promised  him  sittings  at  the  Royal  Academy 
and  then  refused  him  on  the  ground  that  his  legs  were  too 
hairy.  He  complained  to  Gogin : 

"Why,"  said  he,  "I  sat  at  the  Slade  School  for  the  figure 
only  last  week,  and  there  were  five  ladies,  but  not  one  of  them 
told  me  my  legs  were  too  hairy." 

A   Sailor  Boy  and  Some  Chickens 

A  pretty  girl  in  the  train  had  some  chirping  chickens 
about  ten  days'  old  in  a  box  labelled  "German  egg  powders. 
One  packet  equal  to  six  eggs."  A  sailor  boy  got  in  at  Basing- 
stoke,  a  quiet,  reserved  youth,  well  behaved  and  unusually 
good-looking.  By  and  by  the  chickens  were  taken  out  of  the 
box  and  fed  with  biscuit  on  the  carriage  seat.  This  thawed 
the  boy  who,  though  he  fought  against  it  for  some  time, 
yielded  to  irresistible  fascination  and  said : 

"What  are  they?" 

"Chickens,"  said  the  girl. 

"Will  they  grow  bigger?" 

"Yes." 

Then  the  boy  said  with  an  expression  of  infinite  wonder: 
"And  did  you  hatch  them  from  they  powders  ?" 

We  all  laughed  till  the  boy  blushed  and  I  was  very  sorry 
for  him.  If  we  had  said  they  had  been  hatched  from  the 
powders  he  would  have  certainly  believed  us. 

Gogin,  the  Japanese  Gentleman  and  the 
Dead  Dog 

Gogin  was  one  day  going  down  Cleveland  Street  and  saw  an 
old,  lean,  careworn  man  crying  over  the  body  of  his  dog  which 
had  been  just  run  over  and  killed  by  the  old  man's  own  cart. 
I  have  no  doubt  it  was  the  dog's  fault,  for  the  man  was  in 
great  distress ;  as  for  the  dog  there  it  lay  all  swelled  and  livid 
where  the  wheel  had  gone  over  it,  its  eyes  protruded  from 
their  sockets  and  its  tongue  lolled  out,  but  it  was  dead.  The 
old  man  gazed  on  it,  helplessly  weeping,  for  some  time  and 


246  Written  Sketches 

then  got  a  large  piece  of  brown  paper  in  which  he  wrapped  up 
the  body  of  his  favourite ;  he  tied  it  neatly  with  a  piece  of 
string  and,  placing  it  in  his  cart,  went  homeward  with  a  heavy 
heart.  The  day  was  dull,  the  gutters  were  full  of  cabbage 
stalks  and  the  air  resounded  with  the  cry  of  costermongers. 

On  this  a  Japanese  gentleman,  who  had  watched  the  scene, 
lifted  up  his  voice  and  made  the  bystanders  a  set  oration.  He 
was  very  yellow,  had  long  black  hair,  gold  spectacles  and  a 
top  hat ;  he  was  a  typical  Japanese,  but  he  spoke  English  per- 
fectly. He  said  the  scene  they  had  all  just  witnessed  was  a 
very  sad  one  and  that  it  ought  not  to  be  passed  over  entirely 
without  comment.  He  explained  that  it  was  very  nice  of  the 
good  old  man  to  be  so  sorry  about  his  dog  and  to  be  so  careful 
of  its  remains  and  that  he  and  all  the  bystanders  must  sym- 
pathise with  him  in  his  grief,  and  as  the  expression  of  their 
sympathy,  both  with  the  man  and  with  the  poor  dog,  he  had 
thought  fit,  with  all  respect,  to  make  them  his  present  speech. 

I  have  not  the  man's  words  but  Gogin  said  they  were  like 
a  Japanese  drawing,  that  is  to  say,  wonderfully  charming,  and 
showing  great  knowledge  but  not  done  in  the  least  after  the 
manner  in  which  a  European  would  do  them.  The  bystanders 
stood  open-mouthed  and  could  make  nothing  of  it,  but  they 
liked  it,  and  the  Japanese  gentleman  liked  addressing  them. 
When  he  left  off  and  went  away  they  followed  him  with  their 
eyes,  speechless. 

St.  Pancras'  Bells 

Gogin  lives  at  164  Euston  Road,  just  opposite  St.  Pancras 
Church,  and  the  bells  play  doleful  hymn  tunes  opposite  his 
window  which  worries  him.  My  St.  Dunstan's  bells  near 
Clifford's  Inn  play  doleful  hymn  tunes  which  enter  in  at  my 
window ;  I  not  only  do  not  dislike  them,  but  rather  like  them ; 
they  are  so  silly  and  the  bells  are  out  of  tune.  I  never  yet  was 
annoyed  by  either  bells  or  street  music  except  when  a  loud 
piano  organ  strikes  up  outside  the  public-house  opposite  my 
bedroom  window  after  I  am  in  bed  and  when  I  am  just  going 
to  sleep.  However,  Jones  was  at  Gogin's  one  summer  evening 
and  the  bells  struck  up  their  dingy  old  burden  as  usual.  The 
tonic  bell  on  which  the  tune  concluded  was  the  most  stuffy 
and  out  of  tune.  Gogin  said  it  was  like  the  smell  of  a  bug. 


Written  Sketches  247 


I  saw  a  man  painting  there  the  other  day  but  passed  his 
work  without  looking  at  it  and  sat  down  to  sketch  some 
hundred  of  yards  off.  In  course  of  time  he  came  strolling 
round  to  see  what  I  was  doing  and  I,  not  knowing  but  what 
he  might  paint  much  better  than  I,  was  apologetic  and  said 
I  was  not  a  painter  by  profession. 

"What  are  you  ?"  said  he. 

I  said  I  was  a  writer. 

"Dear  me,"  said  he.  "Why  that's  my  line— I'm  a 
writer." 

I  laughed  and  said  I  hoped  he  made  it  pay  better  than  I 
did.  He  said  it  paid  very  well  and  asked  me  where  I  lived 
and  in  what  neighbourhood  my  connection  lay.  I  said  I  had 
no  connection  but  only  wrote  books. 

"Oh!  I  see.  You  mean  you  are  an  author.  I'm  not 
an  author;  I  didn't  mean  that.  I  paint  people's  names 
up  over  their  shops,  and  that's  what  we  call  being  a  writer. 
There  isn't  a  touch  on  my  work  as  good  as  any  touch  on 
yours." 

I  was  gratified  by  so  much  modesty  and,  on  my  way  back 
to  dinner,  called  to  see  his  work.  I  am  afraid  that  he  was  not 
far  wrong — it  was  awful. 

Omne  ignotum  pro  magnifico  holds  with  painters  perhaps 
more  than  elsewhere ;  we  never  see  a  man  sketching,  or  even 
carrying  a  paint-box,  without  rushing  to  the  conclusion  that 
he  can  paint  very  well.  There  is  no  cheaper  way  of  getting  a 
reputation  than  that  of  going  about  with  easel,  paint-box,  etc., 
provided  one  can  ensure  one's  work  not  being  seen.  And  the 
more  traps  one  carries  the  cleverer  people  think  one. 

Mrs.  Hicks 

She  and  her  husband,  an  old  army  sergeant  who  was  all 
through  the  Indian  Mutiny,  are  two  very  remarkable  people ; 
they  keep  a  public-house  where  we  often  get  our  beer  when 
out  for  our  Sunday  walk.  She  owns  to  sixty-seven,  I  should 
think  she  was  a  full  seventy-five,  and  her  husband,  say,  sixty- 
five.  She  is  a  tall,  raw-boned  Gothic  woman  with  a  strong 


248  Written  Sketches 

family  likeness  to  the  crooked  old  crusader  who  lies  in  the 
church  transept,  and  one  would  expect  to  find  her  body 
scrawled  over  with  dates  ranging  from  400  years  ago  to  the 
present  time,  just  as  the  marble  figure  itself  is.  She  has  a 
great  beard  and  moustaches  and  three  projecting  teeth  in  her 
lower  jaw  but  no  more  in  any  part  of  her  mouth.  She  moves 
slowly  and  is  always  a  little  in  liquor  besides  being  singularly 
dirty  in  her  person.  Her  husband  is  like  unto  her. 

For  all  this  they  are  hard-working  industrious  people,  keep 
no  servant,  pay  cash  for  everything,  are  clearly  going  up 
rather  than  down  in  the  world  and  live  well.  She  always 
shows  us  what  she  is  going  to  have  for  dinner  and  it  is  excel- 
lent— "And  I  made  the  stuffing  over  night  and  the  gravy  first 
thing  this  morning."  Each  time  we  go  we  find  the  house  a 
little  more  done  up.  She  dotes  on  Mr.  Hicks — we  never  go 
there  without  her  wedding  day  being  referred  to.  She  has 
earned  her  own  living  ever  since  she  was  ten  years  old,  and 
lived  twenty-nine  and  a  half  years  in  the  house  from  which 
Mr.  Hicks  married  her.  "I  am  as  happy,"  she  said,  "as  the 
day  is  long."  She  dearly  loves  a  joke  and  a  little  flirtation.  I 
always  say  something  perhaps  a  little  impudently  broad  to 
her  and  she  likes  it  extremely.  Last  time  she  sailed  smilingly 
out  of  the  room,  doubtless  to  tell  Mr.  Hfccks,  and  came  back 
still  smiling. 

When  we  come  we  find  her  as  though  she  had  lien  among 
the  pots,  but  as  soon  as  she  has  given  us  our  beer,  she  goes 
upstairs  and  puts  on  a  cap  and  a  clean  apron  and  washes  her 
face — that  is  to  say,  she  washes  a  round  piece  in  the  middle 
of  her  face,  leaving  a  great  glory  of  dirt  showing  all  round  it. 
It  is  plain  the  pair  are  respected  by  the  manner  in  which  all 
who  come  in  treat  them. 

Last  time  we  were  there  she  said  she  hoped  she  should  not 
die  yet. 

"You  see,"  she  said,  "I  am  beginning  now  to  know  how 
to  live." 

These  were  her  own  words  and,  considering  the  circum- 
stances under  which  they  were  spoken,  they  are  enough  to 
stamp  the  speaker  as  a  remarkable  woman.  She  has  got  as 
much  from  age  and  lost  as  little  from  youth  as  woman  can 
well  do.  Nevertheless,  to  look  at,  she  is  like  one  of  the 
witches  in  Macbeth. 


Written  Sketches  249 

New-Laid  Eggs 

When  I  take  my  Sunday  walks  in  the  country,  I  try  to  buy 
a  few  really  new-laid  eggs  warm  from  the  nest.  At  this  time 
of  the  year  (January)  they  are  very  hard  to  come  by,  and  I 
have  long  since  invented  a  sick  wife  who  has  implored  me  to 
get  her  a  few  eggs  laid  not  earlier  than  the  self-same  morning. 
Of  late,  as  I  am  getting  older,  it  has  become  my  daughter 
who  has  just  had  a  little  baby.  This  will  generally  draw  a 
new-laid  egg,  if  there  is  one  about  the  place  at  all. 

At  Harrow  Weald  it  has  always  been  my  wife  who  for 
years  has  been  a  great  sufferer  and  finds  a  really  new-laid  egg 
the  one  thing  she  can  digest  in  the  way  of  solid  food.  So  I 
turned  her  on  as  movingly  as  I  could  not  long  since,  and  was 
at  last  sold  some  eggs  that  were  no  better  than  common  shop 
eggs,  if  so  good.  Next  time  I  went  I  said  my  poor  wife  had 
been  made  seriously  ill  by  them ;  it  was  no  good  trying  to  de- 
ceive her ;  she  could  tell  a  new-laid  egg  from  a  bad  one  as  well 
as  any  woman  in  London,  and  she  had  such  a  high  temper 
that  it  was  very  unpleasant  for  me  when  she  found  herself 
disappointed. 

"Ah !  sir,"  said  the  landlady,  "but  you  would  not  like  to 
lose  her." 

"Ma'am,"  I  replied,  "I  must  not  allow  my  thoughts  to 
wander  in  that  direction.  But  it's  no  use  bringing  her  stale 
eggs,  anyhow." 

"The  Egg  that  Hen  Belonged  to" 

I  got  some  new-laid  eggs  a  few  Sundays  ago.  The  landlady 
said  they  were  her  own,  and  talked  about  them  a  good  deal. 
She  pointed  to  one  of  them  and  said : 

"Now,  would  you  believe  it?  The  egg  that  hen  belonged 
to  laid  53  hens  running  and  never  stopped." 

She  called  the  egg  a  hen  and  the  hen  an  egg.  One  would 
have  thought  she  had  been  reading  Life  and  Habit  [p.  134  and 
passim] . 

At  Englefield  Green 

As  an  example  of  how  anything  can  be  made  out  of  any- 
thing or  done  with  anything  by  those  who  want  to  do  it  (as  I 


250  Written  Sketches 

said  in  Life  and  Habit  that  a  bullock  can  take  an  eyelash  out 
of  its  eye  with  its  hind-foot — which  I  saw  one  of  my  bullocks 
in  New  Zealand  do),  at  the  Barley  Mow,  Englefield  Green, 
they  have  a  picture  of  a  horse  and  dog  talking  to  one  another, 
made  entirely  of  butterflies'  wings,  and  very  well  and  spir- 
itedly done  too. 

They  have  another  picture,  done  in  the  same  way,  of  a  grey- 
hound running  after  a  hare,  also  good  but  not  so  good. 

At  Abbey  Wood 

I  heard  a  man  say  to  another:  "I  went  to  live  there  just 
about  the  time  that  beer  came  down  from  5d.  to  4d.  a  pot. 
That  will  give  you  an  idea  when  it  was." 

At  Ightham  Mote 

We  took  Ightham  on  one  of  our  Sunday  walks  about  a  fort- 
night ago,  and  Jones  and  I  wanted  to  go  inside  over  the  house. 

My  cousin  said,  "You'd  much  better  not,  it  will  only  un- 
settle your  history." 

We  felt,  however,  that  we  had  so  little  history  to  unsettle 
that  we  left  him  outside  and  went  in. 

Dr.  Mandell  Creighton  and  Mr.  W.  S.  Rockstro 

"The  Bishop  had  been  reading  Mr.  Samuel  Butler's  en- 
chanting book  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  and  determined  to  visit 
some  of  the  places  there  described.  We  divided  our  time  be- 
tween the  Italian  lakes  and  the  lower  slopes  of  the  Alps  and 
explored  many  mountain  sanctuaries.  .  .  .  As  a  result  of  this 
journey  the  Bishop  got  to  know  Mr.  S.  Butler.  He  wrote  to 
tell  him  the  pleasure  his  books  had  given  us  and  asked  him  to 
visit  us.  After  this  he  came  frequently  and  the  Bishop  was 
much  attracted  by  his  original  'mind  and  stores  of  out-of-the- 
way  knowledge."  (The  Life  and  Letters  of  Dr.  Mandell 
Creighton  by  his  Wife,  Vol.  II,  p.  83.) 

The  first  time  that  Dr.  Creighton  asked  me  to  come  down 
to  Peterborough  in  1894  before  he  became  Bishop  of  London, 
I  was  a  little  doubtful  whether  to  go  or  not.  As  usual,  I 
consulted  my  good  clerk,  Alfred,  who  said : 


Written  Sketches  251 

"Let  me  have  a  look  at  his  letter,  sir." 

I  gave  him  the  letter,  and  he  said: 

"I  see,  sir,  there  is  a  crumb  of  tobacco  in  it;  I  think  you 
may  go." 

I  went  and  enjoyed  myself  very  much.  I  should  like  to 
add  that  there  are  very  few  men  who  have  ever  impressed  me 
so  profoundly  and  so  favourably  as  Dr.  Creighton.  I  have 
often  seen  him  since,  both  at  Peterborough  and  at  Fulham, 
and  like  and  admire  him  most  cordially.* 

I  paid  my  first  visit  to  Peterborough  at  a  time  when  that 
learned  musician  and  incomparable  teacher,  Mr.  W.  S. 
Rockstro,  was  giving  me  lessons  in  medieval  counterpoint ; 
so  I  particularly  noticed  the  music  at  divine  service.  The 
hymns  were  very  silly,  and  of  the  usual  Gounod-Barnby 
character.  Their  numbers  were  posted  up  in  a  frame  and  I 
saw  there  were  to  be  five,  so  I  called  the  first  Farringdon 
Street,  the  second  King's  Cross,  the  third  Gower  Street,  the 
fourth  Portland  Road,  and  the  fifth  Baker  Street,  those  being 
stations  on  my  way  to  Rickmansworth,  where  I  frequently 
go  for  a  walk  in  the  country. 

In  his  private  chapel  at  night  the  bishop  began  his  verse 
of  the  psalms  always  well  before  we  had  done  the  response 
to  the  preceding  verse.  It  reminded  me  of  what  Rockstro 
had  said  a  few  weeks  earlier  to  the  effect  that  a  point  of 
imitation  was  always  more  effective  if  introduced  before  the 
other  voices  had  finished.  I  told  Rockstro  about  it  and  said 
that  the  bishop's  instinct  had  guided  him  correctly — certainly 
I  found  his  method  more  satisfactory  than  if  he  had  waited 
till  we  had  finished.  Rockstro  smiled,  and  knowing  that  I 
was  at  the  time  forbidden  to  work,  said : 

"Satan  finds  some  mischief  still  for  idle  brains  to  do." 

*  This  note  is  one  of  those  that  appeared  in  the  New  Quarterly 
Review.  The  Hon.  Mrs.  Richard  Grosvenor  did  not  see  it  there,  but 
a  few  years  later  I  lent  her  my  copy.  She  wrote  to  me  31  December, 
1911 : 

"The  notes  are  delightful.  By  the  way  I  can  add  to  one.  When 
Mr.  Butler  came  to  tell  me  he  was  going  to  stay  with  Dr.  Creighton, 
he  told  me  that  Alfred  had  decided  he  might  go  on  finding  the  little 
flake  of  tobacco  in  the  letter.  Then  he  asked  me  if  I  would  lend  him 
a  prayer-book  as  he  thought  the  bishop's  man  ought  to  find  one  in  his 
portmanteau  when  he  unpacked,  the  visit  being  from  a  Saturday  to 
Monday.  I  fetched  one  and  he  said: 

"'Is  it  cut?'" 


252  Written  Sketches 

Talking  of  Rockstro,  he  scolded  me  once  and  said  he 
wondered  how  I  could  have  done  such  a  thing  as  to  call 
Handel  "one  of  the  greatest  of  all  musicians,"  referring  to 
the  great  chords  in  Erewhon.  I  said  that  if  he  would  look 
again  at  the  passage  he  would  find  I  had  said  not  that  Handel 
was  "one  of  the  greatest"  but  that  he  was  "the  greatest  of  all 
musicians,"  on  which  he  apologised. 

Pigs 

We  often  walk  from  Rickmansworth  across  Moor  Park  to 
Pinner.  On  getting  out  of  Moor  Park  there  is  a  public-house 
just  to  the  left  where  we  generally  have  some  shandy-gaff  and 
buy  some  eggs.  The  landlord  had  a  noble  sow  which  I 
photographed  for  him ;  some  months  afterwards  I  asked  how 
the  sow  was.  She  had  been  sold.  The  landlord  knew  she 
ought  to  be  killed  and  made  into  bacon,  but  he  had  been 
intimate  with  her  for  three  years  and  some  one  else  must  eat 
her,  not  he. 

"And  what,"  said  I,  "became  of  her  daughter?" 

"Oh,  we  killed  her  and  ate  her.  You  see  we  had  only 
known  her  eighteen  months." 

I  wonder  how  he  settled  the  exact  line  beyond  which 
intimacy  with  a  pig  must  not  go  if  the  pig  is  to  be  eaten. 

Mozart 

An  old  Scotchman  at  Boulogne  was  holding  forth  on  the 
beauties  of  Mozart,  which  he  exemplified  by  singing  thus: 


Deh  .  .  . 


I  maliciously  assented,  but  said  it  was  strange  how  strongly 
that  air  always  reminded  me  of  "Voi  che  sapete." 

Divorce 

There  was  a  man  in  the  hotel  at  Harwich  with  an  ugly 
disagreeable  woman  who  I  supposed  was  his  wife.    I  did  not 


Written  Sketches  253 

care  about  him,  but  he  began  to  make  up  to  me  in  the  smoking- 
room. 

"This  divorce  case,"  said  he,  referring  to  one  that  was 
being  reported  in  the  papers,  "doesn't  seem  to  move  very 
fast." 

I  put  on  my  sweetest  smile  and  said :  "I  have  not  observed 
it.  I  am  not  married  myself,  and  naturally  take  less  interest 
in  divorce." 

He  dropped  me. 

Ravens 

Mr.  Latham,  the  Master  of  Jones's  College,  Trinity  Hall, 
Cambridge,  has  two  ravens  named  Agrippa  and  Agrippina. 
Mr.  Latham  throws  Agrippa  a  piece  of  cheese;  Agrippa  takes 
it,  hides  it  carefully  and  then  goes  away  contented;  but 
Agrippina  has  had  her  eye  upon  him  and  immediately  goes 
and  steals  it,  hiding  it  somewhere  else;  Agrippa,  however, 
has  always  one  eye  upon  Agrippina  and  no  sooner  is  her  back 
turned  than  he  steals  it  and  buries  it  anew ;  then  it  becomes 
Agrippina's  turn,  and  thus  they  pass  the  time,  making  believe 
that  they  want  the  cheese  though  neither  of  them  really 
wants  it.  One  day  Agrippa  had  a  small  fight  with  a  spaniel 
and  got  rather  the  worst  of  it.  He  immediately  flew  at 
Agrippina  and  gave  her  a  beating.  Jones  said  he  could  almost 
hear  him  say,  "It's  all  your  fault." 

Calais  to  Dover 

When  I  got  on  board  the  steamer  at  Calais  I  saw  Lewis 
Day,  who  writes  books  about  decoration,  and  began  to  talk 
with  him.  Also  I  saw  A.  B.,  Editor  of  the  X.F.Z.  Review. 
I  met  him  some  years  ago  at  Phipson  Beale's,  but  we  do  not 
speak.  Recently  I  wanted  him  to  let  me  write  an  article  in 
his  review  and  he  would  not,  so  I  was  spiteful  and,  when  I 
saw  him  come  on  board,  said  to  Day: 

"I  see  we  are  to  have  the  Editor  of  the  X.Y.Z.  on  board." 

"Yes,"  said  Day. 

"He's  an  owl,"  said  I  sententiously. 

"I  wonder,"  said  Day,  "how  he  got  the  editorship  of  his 
review  ?" 

"Oh,"  said  I,  "I  suppose  he  married  some  one." 


254  Written  Sketches 

On  this  the  conversation  dropped,  and  we  parted.  Later 
on  we  met  again  and  Day  said : 

"Do  you  know  who  that  lady  was — the  one  standing  at 
your  elbow  when  we  were  talking  just  now?" 

"No,"  said  I. 

"That,"  he  replied,  "was  Mrs.  A.  B." 

And  it  was  so. 


Snapshotting  a  Bishop 

I  must  some  day  write  about  how  I  hunted  the  late  Bishop 
of  Carlisle  with  my  camera,  hoping  to  shoot  him  when  he  was 
sea-sick  crossing  from  Calais  to  Dover,  and  how  St.  Some- 
body protected  him  and  said  I  might  shoot  him  when  he  was 
well,  but  not  when  he  was  sea-sick.  I  should  like  to  do  it  in 
the  manner  of  the  Odyssey: 

.  .  .  And  the  steward  went  round  and  laid  them  all  on  the 
sofas  and  benches  and  he  set  a  beautiful  basin  by  each, 
variegated  and  adorned  with  flowers,  but  it  contained  no 
water  for  washing  the  hands,  and  Neptune  sent  great  waves 
that  washed  over  the  eyelet-holes  of  the  cabin.  But  when 
it  was  now  the  middle  of  the  passage  and  a  great  roaring 
arose  as  of  beasts  in  the  Zoological  Gardens,  and  they  prom- 
ised hecatombs  to  Neptune  if  he  would  still  the  raging  of  the 
waves.  .  .  . 

At  any  rate  I  shot  him  and  have  him  in  my  snap-shot  book, 
but  he  was  not  sea-sick.  [1892.] 

Homer  and  the  Basins 

When  I  returned  from  Calais  last  December,  after  spending 
Christmas  at  Boulogne  according  to  my  custom,  the  sea  was 
rough  as  I  crossed  to  Dover  and,  having  a  cold  upon  me,  I 
went  down  into  the  second-class  cabin,  cleared  the  railway 
books  off  one  of  the  tables,  spread  out  my  papers  and  con- 
tinued my  translation,  or  rather  analysis,  of  the  Iliad.  Several 
people  of  all  ages  and  sexes  were  on  the  sofas  and  they  soon 
began  to  be  sea-sick.  There  was  no  steward,  so  I  got  them 
each  a  basin  and  placed  it  for  them  as  well  as  I  could ;  then 
I  sat  down  again  at  my  table  in  the  middle  and  went  on  with 
my  translation  while  they  were  sick  all  round  me.  I  had  to 


Written  Sketches  255 

get  the  Iliad  well  into  my  head  before  I  began  my  lecture  on 
The  Humour  of  Homer  and  I  could  not  afford  to  throw  away 
a  couple  of  hours,  but  I  doubt  whether  Homer  was  ever 
before  translated  under  such  circumstances.  [1892.] 

The  Channel  Passage 

How  holy  people  look  when  they  are  sea-sick !  There  was 
a  patient  Parsee  near  me  who  seemed  purified  once  and  for 
ever  from  all  taint  of  the  flesh.  Buddha  was  a  low,  worldly 
minded,  music-hall  comic  singer  in  comparison.  He  sat  like 
this  for  a  long  time  until  .  .  .  and  he  made  a  noise  like  cows 
coming  home  to  be  milked  on  an  April  evening. 

The  Two  Barristers  at  Ypres 

When  Gogin  and  I  were  taking  our  Easter  holiday  this 
year  we  went,  among  other  places,  to  Ypres.  We  put  up  at 
the  Hotel  Tete  d'Or  and  found  it  exquisitely  clean,  comfort- 
able and  cheap,  with  a  charming  old-world,  last-century 
feeling.  It  was  Good  Friday,  and  we  were  to  dine  maigre; 
this  was  so  clearly  de  rigueur  that  we  did  not  venture  even 
the  feeblest  protest. 

When  we  came  down  to  dinner  we  were  told  that  there 
were  two  other  gentlemen,  also  English,  who  were  to  dine 
with  us,  and  in  due  course  they  appeared — the  one  a  man 
verging  towards  fifty-eight,  a  kind  of  cross  between  Cardinal 
Manning  and  the  late  Mr.  John  Parry,  the  other  some  ten 
years  younger,  amiable-looking  and,  I  should  say,  not  so 
shining  a  light  in  his  own  sphere  as  his  companion.  These 
two  sat  on  one  side  of  the  table  and  we  opposite  them.  There 
was  an  air  about  them  both  which  said :  "You  are  not  to 
try  to  get  into  conversation  with  us;  we  shall  not  let  you 
if  you  do;  we  dare  say  you  are  very  good  sort  of  people, 
but  we  have  nothing  in  common ;  so  long  as  you  keep  quiet 
we  will  not  hurt  you ;  but  if  you  so  much  as  ask  us  to  pass  the 
melted  butter  we  will  shoot  you."  We  saw  this  and  so,  during 
the  first  two  courses,  talked  sotto  voce  to  one  another,  and 
made  no  attempt  to  open  up  communications. 

With  the  third  course,  however,  there  was  a  new  arrival  in 
the  person  of  a  portly  gentleman  of  about  fifty-five,  or  from 


256  Written  Sketches 

that  to  sixty,  who  was  told  to  sit  at  the  head  of  the  table,  and 
accordingly  did  so.  This  gentleman  had  a  decided  manner 
and  carried  quite  as  many  guns  as  the  two  barristers  (for 
barristers  they  were)  who  sat  opposite  to  us.  He  had  rather 
a  red  nose,  he  dined  niaigre  because  he  had  to,  but  he  did  not 
like  it.  I  do  not  think  he  dined  maigre  often.  He  had  some- 
thing of  the  air  of  a  half,  if  not  wholly,  broken-down  black- 
guard of  a  gambler  who  had  seen  much  but  had  moved  in 
good  society  and  been  accustomed  to  have  things  more  or 
less  his  own  way. 

This  gentleman,  who  before  he  went  gave  us  his  card, 
immediately  opened  up  conversation  both  with  us 'and  with 
our  neighbours,  addressing  his  remarks  alternately  and  im- 
partially to  each.  He  said  he  was  an  Italian  who  had  the 
profoundest  admiration  for  England.  I  said  at  once — 

"Lei  non  puo  amare  1'Inghilterra  piu  che  io  amo  ed  ammiro 
1'  Italia." 

The  Manning-Parry  barrister  looked  up  with  an  air  of 
slightly  offended  surprise.  Conversation  was  from  this  point 
carried  on  between  both  parties  through  the  Italian  who 
acted,  as  Gogin  said  afterwards,  like  one  of  those  stones  in 
times  of  plague  on  which  people  from  the  country  put  their 
butter  and  eggs  and  people  from  the  town  their  money. 

By  and  by  dealings  became  more  direct  between  us  and  at 
last,  I  know  not  how,  I  found  myself  in  full  discussion  with 
the  elder  barrister  as  to  whether  Jean  Van  Eyck's  picture  in 
the  National  Gallery  commonly  called  "Portrait  of  John 
Arnolfini  and  his  Wife"  should  not  properly  be  held  to  be  a 
portrait  of  Van  Eyck  himself  (which,  by  the  way,  I  suppose 
there  is  no  doubt  that  it  should  not,  though  I  have  never 
gone  into  the  evidence  for  the  present  inscription).  Then 
they  spoke  of  the  tricks  of  light  practised  by  De  Hooghe ;  so 
we  rebelled,  and  said  De  Hooghe  had  no  tricks — no  one  less — 
and  that  what  they  called  trick  was  only  observation  and 
direct  rendering  of  nature.  Then  they  applauded  Tintoretto, 
and  so  did  we,  but  still  as  men  who  were  bowing  the  knee  to 
Baal.  We  put  in  a  word  for  Gaudenzio  Ferrari,  but  they  had 
never  heard  of  him.  Then  they  played  Raffaelle  as  a  safe 
card  and  we  said  he  was  a  master  of  line  and  a  facile  deco- 
rator, but  nothing  more. 

On  this  all  the  fat  was  in  the  fire,  for  they  had  invested  in 


Written  Sketches  257 

Raffaelle  as  believing  him  to  be  the  Three  per  Cents  of  artistic 
securities.  Did  I  not  like  the  "Madonna  di  S.  Sisto"?  I  said, 
"No."  I  said  the  large  photo  looked  well  at  a  distance 
because  the  work  was  so  concealed  under  a  dark  and  sloppy 
glaze  that  any  one  might  see  into  it  pretty  much  what  one 
chose  to  bring,  while  the  small  photo  looked  well  because  it 
had  gained  so  greatly  by  reduction.  I  said  the  Child  was  all 
very  well  as  a  child  but  a  failure  as  a  Christ,  as  all  infant 
Christs  must  be  to  the  end  of  time.  I  said  the  Pope  and  female 
saint,  whoever  she  was,  were  commonplace,  as  also  the  angels 
at  the  bottom.  I  admitted  the  beauty  of  line  in  the  Virgin's 
drapery  and  also  that  the  work  was  an  effective  piece  of 
decoration,  but  I  said  it  was  not  inspired  by  devotional  or 
serious  feeling  of  any  kind  and  for  impressiveness  could  not 
hold  its  own  with  even  a  very  average  Madonna  by  Giovanni 
Bellini.  They  appealed  to  the  Italian,  but  he  said  there  was 
a  great  reaction  against  Raffaelle  in  Italy  now  and  that  few 
of  the  younger  men  thought  of  him  as  their  fathers  had  done. 
Gogin,  of  course,  backed  me  up,  so  they  were  in  a  minority. 
It  was  not  at  all  what  they  expected  or  were  accustomed  to. 
I  yielded  wherever  I  could  and  never  differed  without  giving 
a  reason  which  they  could  understand.  They  must  have  seen 
that  there  was  no  malice  prepense,  but  it  always  came  round 
to  this  in  the  end  that  we  did  not  agree  with  them. 

Then  they  played  Leonardo  Da  Vinci.  I  had  not  intended 
saying  how  cordially  I  dislike  him,  but  presently  they  became 
enthusiastic  about  the  head  of  the  Virgin  in  the  "Vierge  aux 
Rochers"  in  our  Gallery.  I  said  Leonardo  had  not  succeeded 
with  this  head ;  he  had  succeeded  with  the  angel's  head 
lower  down  to  the  right  (I  think)  of  the  picture,  but  had 
failed  with  the  Madonna.  They  did  not  like  my  talking  about 
Leonardo  Da  Vinci  as  now  succeeding  and  now  failing,  just 
like  other  people.  I  said  it  was  perhaps  fortunate  that  we 
knew  the  "Last  Supper"  only  by  engravings  and  might  fancy 
the  original  to  have  been  more  full  of  individuality  than  the 
engravings  are,  and  I  greatly  questioned  whether  I  should 
have  liked  the  work  if  I  had  seen  it  as  it  was  when  Leonardo 
left  it.  As  for  his  caricatures  he  should  not  have  done  them, 
much  less  preserved  them;  the  fact  of  his  having  set  store 
by  them  was  enough  to  show  that  there  was  a  screw  loose 
about  him  somewhere  and  that  he  had  no  sense  of  humour. 


258  Written  Sketches 

Still,  I  admitted  that  I  liked  him  better  than  I  did  Michaei 
Angelo. 

Whatever  we  touched  upon  the  same  fatality  attended  us. 
Fortunately  neither  evolution  nor  politics  came  under  dis- 
cussion, nor  yet,  happily,  music,  or  they  would  have  praised 
Beethoven  and  very  likely  Mendelssohn  too.  They  did  begin 
to  run  Nuremberg  and  it  was  on  the  tip  of  my  tongue  to  say, 
"Yes,  but  there's  the  flavour  of  FcMst  and  Goethe" ;  however, 
I  did  not.  In  course  of  time  the  seance  ended,  though  not 
till  nearly  ten  o'clock,  and  we  all  went  to  bed. 

Next  morning  we  saw  them  at  breakfast  and  they  were 
quite  tame.  As  Gogin  said  afterwards: 

"They  came  and  sat  on  our  fingers  and  ate  crumbs  out  of 
our  hands."  [1887.] 

At  Montreuil-sur-Mer 

Jones  and  I  lunched  at  the  Hotel  de  France  where  we  found 
everything  very  good.  As  we  were  going  out,  the  landlady, 
getting  on  towards  eighty,  with  a  hookish  nose,  pale  blue  eyes 
and  a  Giovanni  Bellini's  Loredano  Loredani  kind  of  expres- 
sion, came  up  to  us  and  said,  in  sweetly  apologetic  accents : — 

"Avez-vous  done  dejeune  a  peu  pres  selon  vos  idees, 
Messieurs  ?" 

It  would  have  been  too  much  for  her  to  suppose  that  she 
had  been  able  to  give  us  a  repast  that  had  fully  realised  our 
ideals,  still  she  hoped  that  these  had  been,  at  any  rate,  adum- 
brated in  the  luncheon  she  had  provided.  Dear  old  thing: 
of  course  they  had  and  a  great  deal  more  than  adumbrated. 
[26  December,  1901.] 


XVII 

Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel  to 
Alps  and  Sanctuaries 

Mrs.  Dowe  on  Alps  and  Sanctuaries 

AFTER  reading  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  Mrs.  Dowe  said  to 
Ballard :  "You  seem  to  hear  him  talking  to  you  all  the  time 
you  are  reading." 

I  don't  think  I  ever  heard  a  criticism  of  my  books  which 
pleased  me  better,  especially  as  Mrs.  Dowe  is  one  of  the 
women  I  have  always  liked. 

Not  to  be  Omitted 

I  must  get  in  about  the  people  one  meets.  The  man  who 
did  not  like  parrots  because  they  were  too  intelligent.  And 
the  man  who  told  me  that  Handel's  Messiah  was  "tres  chic," 
and  the  smell  of  the  cyclamens  "stupendous."  And  the  man 
who  said  it  was  hard  to  think  the  world  was  not  more  than 
6000  years  old,  and  we  encouraged  him  by  telling  him  we 
thought  it  must  be  even  more  than  7000.  And  the  English 
lady  who  said  of  some  one  that  "being  an  artist,  you  know, 
of  course  he  had  a  great  deal  of  poetical  feeling."  And  the 
man  who  was  sketching  and  said  he  had  a  very  good  eye  for 
colour  in  the  light,  but  would  I  be  good  enough  to  tell  him 
what  colour  was  best  for  the  shadows. 

"An  amateur,"  he  said,  "might  do  very  decent  things  in 
water-colour,  but  oils  require  genius." 

So  I  said:  "What  is  genius?" 

"Millet's  picture  of  the  Angela  sold  for  700,000  francs. 
'Now  that,"  he  said,  "is  genius." 

259 


260      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

After  which  I  was  very  civil  to  him. 

At  Bellinzona  a  man  told  me  that  one  of  the  two  towers 
was  built  by  the  Visconti  and  the  other  by  Julius  Caesar,  a 
hundred  years  earlier.  So,  poor  old  Mrs.  Barratt  at  Langar 
could  conceive  no  longer  time  than  a  hundred  years.  The 
Trojan  war  did  not  last  ten  years,  but  ten  years  was  as  big  a 
lie  as  Homer  knew. 

We  went  over  the  Albula  Pass  to  St.  Moritz  in  two  dili- 
gences and  could  not  settle  which  was  tonic  and  which  was 
dominant ;  but  the  carriage  behind  us  was  the  relative  minor. 

There  was  a  picture  in  the  dining-room  but  we  could  not 
get  near  enough  to  see  it ;  we  thought  it  must  be  either  Christ 
disputing  with  the  Doctors  or  Louis  XVI  saying  farewell  to 
his  family — or  something  of  that  sort. 

The  Sacro  Monte  at  Varese 

The  Sacro  Monte  is  a  kind  of  ecclesiastical  Rosherville 
Gardens,  eminently  the  place  to  spend  a  happy  day. 

The  processions  were  best  at  the  last  part  of  the  ascent; 
there  were  pilgrims,  all  decked  out  with  coloured  feathers, 
and  priests  and  banners  and  music  and  crimson  and  gold  and 
white  and  glittering  brass  against  the  cloudless  blue  sky. 
The  old  priest  sat  at  his  open  window  to  receive  the  offerings 
of  the  devout  as  they  passed,  but  he  did  not  seem  to  get  more 
than  a  few  bambini  modelled  in  wax.  Perhaps  he  was  used 
to  it.  And  the  band  played  the  barocco  music  on  the  barocco 
little  piazza,  and  we  were  all  barocco  together.  It  was  as 
though  the  clergymen  at  Ladywell  had  given  out  that,  instead 
of  having  service  as  usual,  the  congregation  would  go  in  pro- 
cession to  the  Crystal  Palace  with  all  their  traps,  and  that  the 
band  had  been  practising  "Wait  till  the  clouds  roll  by"  for 
some  time,  and  on  Sunday,  as  a  great  treat,  they  should 
have  it. 

The  Pope  has  issued  an  order  saying  he  will  not  have 
masses  written  like  operas.  It  is  no  use.  The  Pope  can  do 
much,  but  he  will  not  be  able  to  get  contrapuntal  music  into 
Varese.  He  will  not  be  able  to  get  anything  more  solemn  than 
La  Filte  de  Madame  Anqot  into  Varese.  As  for  fugues — !  I 
would  as  soon  take  an  English  bishop  to  the  Surrey  panto- 
mime as  to  the  Sacro  Monte  on  a  festa. 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  261 

Then  the  pilgrims  went  into  the  shadow  of  a  great  rock 
behind  the  sanctuary,  spread  themselves  out  over  the  grass 
and  dined. 

The  Albergo  Grotta   Crimea 

The  entrance  to  this  hotel  at  Chiavenna  is  through  a  cov- 
ered court-yard ;  steps  lead  up  to  the  roof  of  the  court-yard, 
which  is  a  terrace  where  one  dines  in  fine  weather.  A  great 
tree  grows  in  the  court-yard  below,  its  trunk  pierces  the  floor 
of  the  terrace,  and  its  branches  shade  the  open-air  dining- 
room.  The  walls  of  the  house  are  painted  in  fresco,  with  a 
check  pattern  like  the  late  Lord  Brougham's  trousers,  and 
there  are  also  pictures.  One  represents  Mendelssohn.  He  is 
not  called  Mendelssohn,  but  I  knew  him  by  his  legs.  He  is  in 
the  costume  of  a  dandy  of  some  five-and-forty  years  ago,  is 
smoking  a  cigar  and  appears  to  be  making  an  offer  of  mar- 
riage to  his  cook.*  Down  below  is  a  fresco  of  a  man  sitting 
on  a  barrel  with  a  glass  in  his  hand.  A  more  absolutely 
worldly  minded,  uncultured  individual  it  would  be  impossible 
to  conceive.  When  I  saw  these  frescoes  I  knew  I  should  get 
along  all  right  and  not  be  over-charged. 

Public  Opinion 

The  public  buys  its  opinions  as  it  buys  its  meat,  or  takes  in 
its  milk,  on  the  principle  that  it  is  cheaper  to  do  this  than  to 
keep  a  cow.  So  it  is,  but  the  milk  is  more  likely  to  be  watered. 

These  Notes 

I  make  them  under  the  impression  that  I  may  use  them  in 
my  books,  but  I  never  do  unless  I  happen  to  remember  them 
at  the  right  time.  When  I  wrote  "Ramblings  in  Cheapside" 
[in  the  Universal  Review,  reprinted  in  Essays  on  Life,  Art 
and  Science]  the  preceding  note  about  Public  Opinion  would 
have  come  in  admirably ;  it  was  in  my  pocket,  in  my  little  black 
note-book,  but  I  forgot  all  about  it  till  I  came  to  post  my 
pocket-book  into  my  note-book. 

*  "  Ramblings  in  Cheapside"  in  Essays  on  Life,  Art  and  Science. 


262      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 
The  Wife  of  Bath 

There  are  Canterbury  Pilgrims  every  Sunday  in  summer 
who  start  from  close  to  the  old  Tabard,  only  they  go  by  the 
South-Eastern  Railway  and  come  back  the  same  day  for  five 
shillings.  And,  what  is  more,  they  are  just  the  same  sort  of 
people.  If  they  do  not  go  to  Canterbury  they  go  by  the 
Clacton  Belle  to  Clacton-on-Sea.  There  is  not  a  Sunday  the 
whole  summer  through  but  you  may  find  all  Chaucer's  pil- 
grims, man  and  woman  for  man  and  woman,  on  board  the 
Lord  of  the  Isles  or  the  Clacton  Belle.  Why,  I  have  seen  the 
Wife  of  Bath  on  the  Lord  of  the  Isles  myself.  She  was  eating 
her  luncheon  off  an  Ally  Sloper's  Half -Holiday,  which  was 
spread  out  upon  her  knees.  Whether  it  was  I  who  had  had 
too  much  beer  or  she  I  cannot  tell,  God  knoweth ;  and  whether 
or  no  I  was  caught  up  into  Paradise,  again  I  cannot  tell ;  but 
I  certainly  did  hear  unspeakable  words  which  it  is  not  lawful 
for  a  man  to  utter,  and  that  not  above  fourteen  years  ago  but 
the  very  last  Sunday  that  ever  was.  The  Wife  of  Bath  heard 
them  too,  but  she  never  turned  a  hair.  Luckily  I  had  my 
detective  camera  with  me,  so  I  snapped  her  there  and  then. 
She  put  her  hand  up  to  her  mouth  at  that  very  moment  and 
rather  spoiled  herself,  but  not  much.  [1891.] 

Horace  at  the  Post-Office  in  Rome 

When  I  was  in  Rome  last  summer  whom  should  I  meet  but 
Horace. 

I  did  not  know  him  at  first,  and  told  him  enquiringly  that 
the  post-office  was  in  the  Piazza  Venezia? 

He  smiled  benignly,  shrugged  his  shoulders,  said  "Prego" 
and  pointed  to  the  post-office  itself,  which  was  over  the  way 
and,  of  course,  in  the  Piazza  S.  Silvestro. 

Then  I  knew  him.  I  believe  he  went  straight  home  and 
wrote  an  epistle  to  Mecaenas,  or  whatever  the  man's  name 
was,  asking  how  it  comes  about  that  people  who  travel  hun- 
dreds of  miles  to  see  things  can  never  see  what  is  all  the  time 
under  their  noses.  In  fact,  I  saw  him  take  out  his  note-book 
and  begin  making  notes  at  once.  He  need  not  talk.  He  was 
not  a  good  man  of  business  and  I  do  not  believe  his  books  sold 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  263 

much  better  than  my  own.  But  this  does  not  matter  to  him 
now,  for  he  has  not  the  faintest  idea  that  he  ever  wrote  any 
of  them  and,  more  likely  than  not,  has  never  even  refreshed 
his  memory  by  reading  them. 

Beethoven  at  Faido  and  at  Boulogne 

I  have  twice  seen  people  so  unmistakably  like  Beethoven 
(just  as  Madame  Patey  is  unmistakably  like  Handel  and  only 
wants  dressing  in  costume  to  be  the  image  of  him  not  in 
features  only  but  in  figure  and  air  and  manner)  that  I  always 
think  of  them  as  Beethoven. 

Once,  at  Faido  in  the  Val  Leventina,  in  1876  or  1877,  when 
the  engineers  were  there  surveying  for  the  tunnel,  there  was 
among  them  a  rather  fine-looking  young  German  with  wild, 
ginger  hair  that  rang  out  to  the  wild  sky  like  the  bells  in  In 
Memoriam,  and  a  strong  Edmund  Gurney  cut,*  who  played 
Wagner  and  was  great  upon  the  overture  to  Lohengrin;  as  for 
Handel — he  was  not  worth  consideration,  etc.  Well,  this 
young  man  rather  took  a  fancy  to  me  and  I  did  not  dislike 
him,  but  one  day,  to  tease  him,  I  told  him  that  a  little  in- 
significant-looking engineer,  the  most  commonplace  mortal 
imaginable,  who  was  sitting  at  the  head  of  the  table,  was  like 
Beethoven.  He  was  very  like  him  indeed,  and  Miiller  saw  it, 
smiled  and  flushed  at  the  same  time.  He  was  short,  getting 
on  in  years  and  was  a  little  thick,  though  not  fat.  A  few  days 
afterwards  he  went  away  and  Miiller  and  I  happened  to  meet 
his  box — an  enormous  cube  of  a  trunk — coming  down  the 
stairs. 

"That's  Beethoven's  box,"  said  Miiller  to  me. 

"Oh,"  I  said,  and,  looking  at  it  curiously  for  a  moment, 
asked  gravely,  "And  is  he  inside  it?"  It  seemed  to  fit  him 
and  to  correspond  so  perfectly  with  him  in  every  way  that  one 
felt  as  though  if  he  were  not  inside  it  he  ought  to  be. 

The  second  time  was  at  Boulogne  this  spring.  There  were 
three  Germans  at  the  Hotel  de  Paris  who  sat  together,  went 
in  and  out  together,  smoked  together  and  did  everything  as 
though  they  were  a  unity  in  trinity  and  a  trinity  in  unity. 
We  settled  that  they  must  be  the  Heckmann  Quartet,  minus 

*  Edmund  Gurney,  author  of  The  Power  of  Sound,  and  Secretary 
of  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research. 


264     Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

Heckmann :  we  had  not  the  smallest  reason  for  thinking  this 
but  we  settled  it  at  once.  The  middle  one  of  these  was  like 
Beethoven  also.  On  Easter  Sunday,  after  dinner,  when  he 
was  a  little — well,  it  was  after  dinner  and  his  hair  went  rather 
mad — Jones  said  to  me : 

"Do  you  see  that  Beethoven  has  got  into  the  posthumous 
quartet  stage?"  [1885.] 

Silvio 

In  the  autumn  of  1884,  Butler  spent  some  time  at  Promon- 
togno  and  Soglio  in  the  Val  Bregaglia,  sketching  and  making 
notes.  Among  the  children  of  the  Italian  families  in  the 
albergo  was  Silvia,  a  boy  of  ten  or  twelve.  He  knew  a  little 
English  and  was  very  fond  of  poetry.  He  could  repeat,  "How 
doth  the  little  buzzy  bee."  The  poem  which  pleased  him  best, 
however,  was: 

Hey  diddle  diddle, 

The  Cat  and  the  Fiddle, 

The  Cow  jumped  over  the  Moon. 

They  had  nothing,  he  said,  in  Italian  literature  so  good  as 
this.  Silvio  used  to  talk  to  Butler  while  he  was  sketching. 

"And  you  shall  read  Longfellow  much  in  England?" 

"No,"  I  replied,  "I  don't  think  we  read  him  very  much." 

"But  how  is  that?    He  is  a  very  pretty  poet." 

"Oh  yes,  but  I  don't  greatly  like  poetry  myself." 

"Why  don't  you  like  poetry  ?" 

"You  see,  poetry  resembles  metaphysics,  one  does  not 
mind  one's  own,  but  one  does  not  like  any  one  else's." 

"Oh !    And  what  you  call  metaphysic  ?" 

This  was  too  much.  It  was  like  the  lady  who  attributed 
the  decline  of  the  Italian  opera  to  the  fact  that  singers  would 
no  longer  "podge"  their  voices. 

"And  what,  pray,  is  'podging'?"  enquired  my  informant 
of  the  lady. 

"Why,  don't  you  understand  what  'podging'  is?  Well, 
I  don't  know  that  I  can  exactly  tell  you,  but  I  am  sure  Edith 
and  Blanche  podge  beautifully." 

However,  I  said  that  metaphysics  were  la  filosofia  and  this 
quieted  him.  He  left  poetry  and  turned  to  prose. 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  265 

"Then  you  shall  like  much  the  works  of  Washington 
Irving?" 

I  was  grieved  to  say  that  I  did  not ;  but  I  dislike  Washington 
Irving  so  cordially  that  I  determined  to  chance  another  "No." 

"Then  you  shall  like  better  Fenimore  Cooper?" 

I  was  becoming  reckless.  I  could  not  go  on  saying  "No" 
after  "No,"  and  yet  to  ask  me  to  be  ever  so  little  enthusiastic 
about  Fenimore  Cooper  was  laying  a  burden  upon  me  heavier 
than  I  could  bear,  so  I  said  I  did  not  like  him. 

"Oh,  I  see,"  said  the  boy;  "then  it  is  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin 
that  you  shall  like?" 

Here  I  gave  in.  More  "Noes"  I  could  not  say,  so,  thinking 
I  might  as  well  be  hung  for  a  sheep  as  for  a  mutton  chop,  I 
said  that  I  thought  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  one  of  the  most 
wonderful  and  beautiful  books  that  ever  was  written. 
Having  got  at  a  writer  whom  I  admired,  he  was  satisfied,  but 
not  for  long. 

"And  you  think  very  much  of  the  theories  of  Darwin  in 
England,  do  you  not?" 

I  groaned  inwardly  and  said  we  did. 

"And  what  are  the  theories  of  Darwin  ?" 

Imagine  what  followed! 

After  which: 

"Why  do  you  not  like  poetry? — You  shall  have  a  very 
good  university  in  London?"  and  so  on. 

Sunday  Morning  at  Soglio 

The  quarantine  men  sat  on  the  wall,  dangling  their  legs 
over  the  parapet  and  singing  the  same  old  tune  over  and  over 
again  and  the  same  old  words  over  and  over  again.  "Fu 
tradito,  fu  tradito  da  una  donna."  To  them  it  was  a  holiday. 

Two  gnomes  came  along  and  looked  at  me.  I  asked  the  first 
how  old  it  was ;  it  said  fourteen.  They  both  looked  about 
eight.  I  said  that  the  flies  and  the  fowls  ought  to  be  put  into 
quarantine,  and  the  gnomes  grinned  and  showed  their  teeth 
till  the  corners  of  their  mouths  met  at  the  backs  of  their  heads. 

The  skeleton  of  a  bird  was  nailed  up  against  a  barn,  and  I 
said  to  a  man  :  "Aquila  ?" 

He  replied :   "Aquila,"  and  I  passed  on. 

The  village  boys  came  round  me  and  sighed  while  they 


266      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

watched  me  sketching.  And  the  women  came  and  exclaimed : 
"Oh  che  testa,  che  testa !" 

And  the  bells  in  the  windows  of  the  campanile  began,  and 
I  turned  and  looked  up  at  their  beautiful  lolling  and  watched 
their  fitful  tumble-aboutiness.  They  swung  open-mouthed 
like  elephants  with  uplifted  trunks,  and  I  wished  I  could  have 
fed  them  with  buns.  They  were  not  like  English  bells,  and 
yet  they  rang  more  all  Tnglese  than  bells  mostly  do  in  Italy — 
they  had  got  it,  but  they  had  not  got  it  right. 

There  used  to  be  two  crows,  and  when  one  disappeared  the 
other  came  to  the  house  where  it  had  not  been  for  a  month. 
While  I  was  sketching  it  played  with  a  woman  who  was 
weeding ;  it  got  on  her  back  and  tried  to  bite  her  hat ;  then  it 
got  down  and  pecked  at  the  nails  in  her  boots  and  tried  to 
steal  them.  It  let  her  catch  it,  and  then  made  a  little  fuss, 
but  it  did  not  fly  away  when  she  let  it  go,  it  continued  playing 
with  her.  Then  it  came  to  exploit  me  but  would  not  come 
close  up.  Signor  Scartazzini  says  it  will  play  with  all  the 
women  of  the  place  but  not  with  men  or  boys,  except  with  him. 

Then  there  came  a  monk  and  passed  by  me,  and  I  knew  I 
had  seen  him  before  but  could  not  think  where  till,  of  a  sud- 
den, it  flashed  across  me  that  he  was  Valoroso  XXIV,  King 
of  Paphlagonia,  no  doubt  expiating  his  offences. 

And  I  watched  the  ants  that  were  busy  near  my  feet,  and 
listened  to  them  as  they  talked  about  me  and  discussed 
whether  man  has  instinct. 

"What  is  he  doing  here?"  they  said;  "he  wasn't  here 
yesterday.  Certainly  they  have  no  instinct.  They  may  have 
a  low  kind  of  reason,  but  nothing  approaching  to  instinct. 
Some  of  the  London  houses  show  signs  of  instinct — Gower 
Street,  for  example,  does  really  seem  to  suggest  instinct;  but 
it  is  all  delusive.  It  is  curious  that  these  cities  of  theirs  should 
always  exist  in  places  where  there  are  no  ants.  They  certainly 
anthropomorphise  too  freely.  Or  is  it  perhaps  that  we  formi- 
comorphise  more  than  we  should?" 

And  Silvio  came  by  on  his  way  to  church.  It  was  he  who 
taught  all  the  boys  in  Soglio  to  make  a  noise.  Before  he  came 
up  there  was  no  sound  to  be  heard  in  the  streets,  except  the 
fountains  and  the  bells.  I  asked  him  whether  the  curate  was 
good  to  him. 

"Si,"  he  replied,  "e  abbastanza  buono." 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  267 

I  should  think  Auld  Robin  Gray  was  "abbastanza  buono" 
to  Mrs.  Gray. 

One  of  the  little  girls  told  me  that  Silvio  had  so  many 
centesimi  and  she  had  none.  I  said  at  once : 

"You  don't  want  any  centesimi." 

As  soon  as  these  words  fell  from  my  lips,  I  knew  I  must  be 
getting  old. 

And  presently  the  Devil  came  up  to  me.  He  was  a  nice, 
clean  old  man,  but  he  dropped  his  h's,  and  that  was  where  he 
spoiled  himself — or  perhaps  it  was  just  this  that  threw  me  off 
my  guard,  for  I  had  always  heard  that  the  Prince  of  Darkness 
was  a  perfect  gentleman.  He  whispered  to  me  that  in  the 
winter  the  monks  of  St.  Bernard  sometimes  say  matins  over- 
night. 

The  blue  of  the  mountains  looks  bluer  through  the  chest- 
nuts than  through  the  pines.  The  river  is  snowy  against  the 
"Verdi  prati  e  selve  amene."  The  great  fat  tobacco  plant 
agrees  with  itself  if  not  with  us ;  I  never  saw  any  plant  look 
in  better  health.  The  briar  knows  perfectly  well  what  it 
wants  to  do  and  that  it  does  not  want  to  be  disturbed;  it 
knows,  in  fact,  all  that  it  cares  to  know.  The  question  is  how 
and  why  it  got  to  care  to  know  just  these  things  and  no  others. 

Two  cheeky  goats  came  tumbling  down  upon  me  and  de- 
manded salt,  and  the  man  came  from  the  saw-mill  and,  with 
his  great  brown  hands,  scooped  the  mud  from  the  dams  of  the 
rills  that  watered  his  meadow,  for  the  hour  had  come  when  it 
was  his  turn  to  use  the  stream. 

There  were  cow-bells,  mountain  elder-berries  and  lots  of 
flowers  in  the  grass.  There  was  the  glacier,  the  roar  of  the 
river  and  a  plaintive  little  chapel  on  a  green  knoll  under  the 
great  cliff  of  ice  which  cut  the  sky.  There  was  a  fat,  crumby 
woman  making  hay.  She  said: 

"Buon  giorno." 

And  the  "i  o  r"  of  the  "giorno"  came  out  like  oil  and 
honey.  I  saw  she  wanted  a  gossip.  She  and  her  husband 
tuned  their  scythes  in  two-part,  note-against-note  counter- 
point; but  I  could  hear  that  it  was  she  who  was  the  canto 
f ermo  and  he  who  was  the  counterpoint.  I  peered  down  over 
the  edge  of  the  steep  slippery  slope  which  all  had  to  be  mown 
from  top  to  bottom;  if  hay  grew  on  the  dome  of  St.  Paul's 
these  dreadful  traders  would  gather  it  in,  and  presently  the 


268      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

autumn  crocuses  would  begin  to  push  up  their  delicate,  naked 
snouts  through  the  closely  shaven  surface.  I  expressed  my 
wonder. 

"Siamo  esatti,"  said  the  fat,  crumby  woman. 

For  what  little  things  will  not  people  risk  their  lives?  So 
Smith  and  I  crossed  the  Rangitata.  So  Esau  sold  his  birth- 
right. 

It  was  noon,  and  I  was  so  sheer  above  the  floor  of  the  valley 
and  the  sun  was  so  sheer  above  me  that  the  chestnuts  in  the 
meadow  of  Bondo  squatted  upon  their  own  shadows  and  the 
gardens  were  as  though  the  valley  had  been  paved  with  bricks 
of  various  colours.  The  old  grass-grown  road  ran  below, 
nearer  the  river,  where  many  a  good  man  had  gone  up  and 
down  on  his  journey  to  that  larger  road  where  the  reader  and 
the  writer  shall  alike  join  him. 

Fascination 

I  know  a  man,  and  one  whom  people  generally  call  a  very 
clever  one,  who,  when  his  eye  catches  mine,  if  I  meet  him  at 
an  at  home  or  an  evening  party,  beams  upon  me  from  afar 
with  the  expression  of  an  intellectual  rattlesnake  on  having 
espied  an  intellectual  rabbit.  Through  any  crowd  that  man 
will  come  sidling  towards  me,  ruthless  and  irresistible  as 
fate;  while  I,  foreknowing  my  doom,  sidle  also  him-wards, 
and  flatter  myself  that  no  sign  of  my  inward  apprehension 
has  escaped  me. 

Supreme  Occasions 

Men  are  seldom  more  commonplace  than  on  supreme  occa- 
sions. I  knew  of  an  old  gentleman  who  insisted  on  having 
the  original  polka  played  to  him  as  he  lay  upon  his  death-bed. 
In  the  only  well-authenticated  words  I  have  ever  met  with 
as  spoken  by  a  man  who  knew  he  was  going  to  be  murdered, 
there  is  a  commonness  which  may  almost  be  called  Shake- 
spearean. There  had  been  many  murders  on  or  near  some 
gold-fields  in  New  Zealand  about  the  years  1863  or  1864,  I 
forget  where  but  I  think  near  the  Nelson  gold-fields,  and  at 
last  the  murderers  were  taken.  One  was  allowed  to  turn 
Queen's  evidence  and  gave  an  account  of  the  circumstances 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  269 

of  each  murder.    One  of  the  victims,  it  appeared,  on  being 
told  they  were  about  to  kill  him,  said  : 

"If  you  murder  me,  I  shall  be  foully  murdered." 
Whereupon  they  murdered  him  and  he  was  foully  murdered. 
It  is  a  mistake  to  expect  people  to  rise  to  the  occasion  unless 
the  occasion  is  only  a  little  above  their  ordinary  limit.    People 
seldom  rise  to  their  greater  occasions,  they  almost  always  fall 
to  them.    It  is  only  supreme  men  who  are  supreme  at  supreme 
moments.    They  differ  from  the  rest  of  us  in  this  that,  when 
the  moment  for  rising  comes,  they  rise  at  once  and  instinc- 
tively. 

The  Aurora  Borealis 

I  saw  one  once  in  the  Gulf  of  the  St.  Lawrence  off  the 
island  of  Anticosti.  We  were  in  the  middle  of  it,  and  seemed 
to  be  looking  up  through  a  great  cone  of  light  millions  and 
millions  of  miles  into  the  sky.  Then  we  saw  it  farther  off 
and  the  pillars  of  fire  stalked  up  and  down  the  face  of  heaven 
like  one  of  Handel's  great  basses. 

In  front  of  my  room  at  Montreal  there  was  a  verandah 
from  which  a  rope  was  stretched  across  a  small  yard  to  a 
chimney  on  a  stable  roof  over  the  way.  Clothes  were  hung  to 
dry  on  this  rope.  As  I  lay  in  bed  of  a  morning  I  could  see 
the  shadows  and  reflected  lights  from  these  clothes  moving  on 
the  ceiling  as  the  clothes  were  blown  about  by  the  wind.  The 
movement  of  these  shadows  and  reflected  lights  was  exactly 
that  of  the  rays  of  an  Aurora  Borealis,  minus  colour.  I  can 
conceive  no  resemblance  more  perfect.  They  stalked  across 
the  ceiling  with  the  same  kind  of  movement  absolutely. 

A  Tragic  Expression 

The  three  occasions  when  I  have  seen  a  really  tragic  ex- 
pression upon  a  face  were  as  follows : — 

(1)  When  Mrs.  Inglis  in  my  room  at  Montreal  heard  my 
sausages  frying,  as  she  thought,  too  furiously  in  the  kitchen, 
she  left  me  hurriedly  with  a  glance,  and  the  folds  of  her  dress 
as  she  swept  out  of  the  room  were  Niobean. 

(2)  Once  at  dinner  I  sat  opposite  a  certain  lady  who  had  a 
tureen  of  soup  before  her  and  also  a  plate  of  the  same  to 
which  she  had  just  helped  herself.    There  was  meat  in  the 


270      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

soup  and  I  suppose  she  got  a  bit  she  did  not  like ;  instead  of 
leaving  it,  she  swiftly,  stealthily,  picked  it  up  from  her  plate 
when  she  thought  no  one  was  looking  and,  with  an  expression 
which  Mrs.  Siddons  might  have  studied  for  a  performance  of 
Clytemnestra,  popped  it  back  into  the  tureen. 

(3)  There  was  an  alarm  of  fire  on  an  emigrant  ship  in 
mid-ocean  when  I  was  going  to  New  Zealand  and  the 
women  rushed  aft  with  faces  as  in  a  Massacre  of  the 
Innocents. 

The  Wrath  to  Come 

On  the  Monte  Generoso  a  lady  who  sat  next  me  at  the 
table-d'hote  was  complaining  of  a  man  in  the  hotel.  She  said 
he  was  a  nuisance  because  he  practised  on  the  violin.  I  ex- 
cused him  by  saying  that  I  supposed  some  one  had  warned 
him  to  fly  from  the  wrath  to  come,  meaning  that  he  had  con- 
ceptions of  an  ideal  world  and  was  trying  to  get  into  it.  (I 
heard  a  man  say  something  like  this  many  years  ago  and  it 
stuck  by  me.) 

The  Beauties  of  Nature 

A  man  told  me  that  at  some  Swiss  hotel  he  had  been  speak- 
ing enthusiastically  about  the  beauty  of  the  scenery  to  a 
Frenchman  who  said  to  him: 

"Airnez-vous  done  les  beautes  de  la  nature?  Pour  moi  je 
les  abhorre." 


The  Late  King  Vittorio  Emanuele 

Cavaliere  Negri,  at  Casale-Monferrato,  told  me  not  long 
since  that  when  he  was  a  child,  during  the  troubles  of  1848 
and  1849,  the  King  was  lunching  with  his  (Cav.  Negri's) 
father  who  had  provided  the  best  possible  luncheon  in  honour 
of  his  guest.  The  King  said  : 

"I  can  eat  no  such  luncheon  in  times  like  these — give  me 
some  garlic." 

The  garlic  being  brought,  he  ate  it  along  with  a  great  hunch 
of  bread,  but  would  touch  nothing  else. 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries 

The  Bishop  of  Chichester  at  Faido 

When  I  was  at  Faido  in  the  Val  Leventina  last  summer 
there  was  a  lady  there  who  remembered  me  in  New  Zealand ; 
she  had  brought  her  children  to  Switzerland  for  their  holiday ; 
good  people,  all  of  them.  They  had  friends  coming  to  them, 
a  certain  canon  and  his  sister,  and  there  was  a  talk  that  the 
Bishop  of  Chichester  might  possibly  come  too.  In  course  of 
time  the  canon  and  his  sister  came.  At  first  the  sister,  who 
was  put  to  sit  next  me  at  dinner,  was  below  zero  and  her 
brother  opposite  was  hardly  less  freezing ;  but  as  dinner  wore 
on  they  thawed  and,  from  regarding  me  as  the  monster  which 
in  the  first  instance  they  clearly  did,  began  to  see  that  I 
agreed  with  them  in  much  more  than  they  had  thought 
possible.  By  and  by  they  were  reassured,  became  cordial  and 
proved  on  acquaintance  to  be  most  kind  and  good.  They 
soon  saw  that  I  liked  them,  and  the  canon  let  me  take  him 
where  I  chose.  I  took  him  to  the  place  where  the  Woodsias 
grow  and  we  found  some  splendid  specimens.  I  took  him  to 
Mairengo  and  showed  him  the  double  chancel.  Coming  back 
he  said  I  had  promised  to  show  him  some  Alternifolium.  I 
stopped  him  and  said : 

"Here  is  some,"  for  there  happened  to  be  a  bit  in  the  wall 
by  the  side  of  the  path. 

This  quite  finished  the  conquest,  and  before  long  I  was 
given  to  understand  that  the  bishop  really  would  come  and  we 
were  to  take  him  pretty  near  the  Woodsias  and  not  tell  him, 
and  he  was  to  find  them  out  for  himself.  I  have  no  doubt  that 
the  bishop  had  meant  coming  with  the  canon,  but  then  the 
canon  had  heard  from  the  New  Zealand  lady  that  I  was  there, 
and  this  would  not  do  at  all  for  the  bishop.  Anyhow  the 
canon  had  better  exploit  me  by  going  first  and  seeing  how 
bad  I  was.  So  the  canon  came,  said  I  was  all  right  and  in  a 
couple  of  days  or  so  the  bishop  and  his  daughters  arrived. 

The  bishop  did  not  speak  to  me  at  dinner,  but  after  dinner, 
in  the  salon,  he  made  an  advance  in  the  matter  of  the  news- 
paper and,  I  replying,  he  began  a  conversation  which  lasted 
the  best  part  of  an  hour,  and  during  which  I  trust  I  behaved 
discreetly.  Then  I  bade  him  "Good-night"  and  left  the 
room. 


272      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

Next  morning  I  saw  him  eating  his  breakfast  and  said 
"Good-morning"  to  him.  He  was  quite  ready  to  talk.  We 
discussed  the  Woodsia  Ilvensis  and  agreed  that  it  was  a 
mythical  species.  It  was  said  in  botany  books  to  grow  near 
Guildford.  We  dismissed  this  assertion.  But  he  remarked 
that  it  was  extraordinary  in  what  odd  places  we  sometimes  do 
find  plants ;  he  knew  a  single  plant  of  Asplenium  Trichomanes 
which  had  no  other  within  thirty  miles  of  it ;  it  was  growing 
on  a  tombstone  which  had  come  from  a  long  distance  and 
from  a  Trichomanes  country.  It  almost  seemed  as  if  the 
seeds  and  germs  were  always  going  about  in  the  air  and  grew 
wherever  they  found  a  suitable  environment.  I  said  it  was 
the  same  with  our  thoughts ;  the  germs  of  all  manner  of 
thoughts  and  ideas  are  always  floating  about  unperceived  in 
our  minds  and  it  was  astonishing  sometimes  in  what  strange 
places  they  found  the  soil  which  enabled  them  to  take  root 
and  grow  into  perceived  thought  and  action.  The  bishop 
looked  up  from  his  egg  and  said : 

"That  is  a  very  striking  remark/'  and  then  he  went  on  with 
his  egg  as  though  if  I  were  going  to  talk  like  that  he  should 
not  play  any  more. 

Thinking  I  was  not  likely  to  do  better  than  this,  I  retreated 
immediately  and  went  away  down  to  Claro  where  there  was  a 
confirmation  and  so  on  to  Bellinzona. 

In  the  morning  I  had  asked  the  waitress  how  she  liked  the 
bishop. 

"Oh!  beaucoup,  beaucoup,"  she  exclaimed,  "et  je  trouve 
son  nez  vraiment  noble."  [  1886.] 

At  Piora 

I  am  confident  that  I  have  written  the  following  note  in 
one  or  other  of  the  earlier  of  these  volumes,  but  I  have 
searched  my  precious  indexes  in  vain  to  find  it.  No  doubt  as 
soon  as  I  have  retold  the  story  I  shall  stumble  upon  it. 

One  day  in  the  autumn  of  1886  I  walked  up  to  Piora  from 
Airolo,  returning  the  same  day.  At  Piora  I  met  a  very  nice 
quiet  man  whose  name  I  presently  discovered,  and  who,  I 
have  since  learned,  is  a  well-known  and  most  liberal  employer 
of  labour  somewhere  in  the  north  of  England.  He  told  me 
that  he  had  been  induced  to  visit  Piora  by  a  book  which  had 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  273 

made  a  great  impression  upon  him.  He  could  not  recollect  its 
title,  but  it  had  made  a  great  impression  upon  him;  nor  yet 
could  he  recollect  the  author's  name,  but  the  book  had  made  a 
great  impression  upon  him ;  he  could  not  remember  even  what 
else  there  was  in  the  book ;  the  only  thing  he  knew  was  that 
it  had  made  a  great  impression  upon  him. 

This  is  a  good  example  of  what  is  called  a  residuary  im- 
pression. Whether  or  no  I  told  him  that  the  book  which  had 
made  such  a  great  impression  upon  him  was  called  Alps  and 
Sanctuaries  (see  Chap.  VI),  and  that  it  had  been  written  by 
the  person  he  was  addressing,  I  cannot  tell.  It  would  be  very 
like  me  to  have  blurted  it  all  out  and  given  him  to  understand 
how  fortunate  he  had  been  in  meeting  me;  this  would  be  so 
fatally  like  me  that  the  chances  are  ten  to  one  that  I  did  it ; 
but  I  have,  thank  Heaven,  no  recollection  of  sin  in  this 
respect,  and  have  rather  a  strong  impression  that,  for  once  in 
my  life,  I  smiled  to  myself  and  said  nothing. 

At  Ferentino 

After  dinner  I  ordered  a  coffee ;  the  landlord,  who  also  had 
had  his  dinner,  asked  me  to  be  good  enough  to  defer  it  for 
another  year  and  I  assented.  I  then  asked  him  which  was  the 
best  inn  at  Segni.  He  replied  that  it  did  not  matter,  that 
when  a  man  had  quattrini  one  albergo  was  as  good  as  another. 
I  said,  No;  that  more  depended  on  what  kind  of  blood  was 
running  about  inside  the  albergatore  than  on  how  many 
quattrini  the  guest  had  in  his  pocket.  He  smiled  and  offered 
me  a  pinch  of  the  most  delicious  snuff.  His  wife  came  and 
cleared  the  table,  having  done  which  she  shed  the  water  bot- 
tle over  the  floor  to  keep  the  dust  down.  I  am  sure  she  did  it 
all  to  all  the  blessed  gods  that  live  in  heaven,  though  she  did 
not  say  so. 


There  was  one  at  a  country  house  in  Sicily  where  I  was 
staying.  She  had  been  lent  to  my  host  for  change  of  air  by 
his  friend  the  marchese.  She  dined  at  table  with  us  and  we 
all  liked  her  very  much.  She  was  extremely  pretty  and  not 
less  amiable  than  pretty.  In  order  to  reach  the  dining-room 


274      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

we  had  to  go  through  her  bedroom  as  also  through  my  host's. 
When  the  monsignore  came,  she  dined  with  us  just  the  same, 
and  the  old  priest  evidently  did  not  mind  at  all.  In  Sicily 
they  do  not  bring  the  scent  of  the  incense  across  the  dining- 
room  table.  And  one  would  hardly  expect  the  attempt  to  be 
made  by  people  who  use  the  oath  "Santo  Diavolo." 

Siena  and  S.  Gimignano 

At  Siena  last  spring,  prowling  round  outside  the  cathedral, 
we  saw  an  English  ecclesiastic  in  a  stringed,  sub-shovel  hat. 
He  had  a  young  lady  with  him,  presumably  a  daughter  or 
niece.  He  eyed  us  with  much  the  same  incurious  curiosity 
as  that  with  which  we  eyed  him.  We  passed  them  and  went 
inside  the  duomo.  How  far  less  impressive  is  the  interior 
(indeed  I  had  almost  said  also  the  exterior)  than  that  of 
San  Domenico!  Nothing  palls  so  soon  as  overornamen- 
tation. 

A  few  minutes  afterwards  my  Lord  and  the  young  lady 
came  in  too.  It  was  Sunday  and  mass  was  being  celebrated. 
The  pair  passed  us  and,  when  they  reached  the  fringe  of  the 
kneeling  folk,  the  bishop  knelt  down  too  on  the  bare  floor, 
kneeling  bolt  upright  from  the  knees,  a  few  feet  in  front  of 
where  we  stood.  We  saw  him  and  I  am  sure  he  knew  we 
were  looking  at  him.  The  lady  seemed  to  hesitate  but,  after 
a  minute  or  so,  she  knuckled  down  by  his  side  and  we 
left  them  kneeling  bolt  upright  from  the  knees  on  the  hard 
floor. 

I  always  cross  myself  and  genuflect  when  I  go  into  a  Roman 
Catholic  church,  as  a  mark  of  respect,  but  Jones  and  Gogin 
say  that  any  one  can  see  I  am  not  an  old  hand  at  it.  Hbw 
rudimentary  is  the  action  of  an  old  priest!  I  saw  one  once 
at  Venice  in  the  dining-room  of  the  Hotel  la  Luna  who  crossed 
himself  by  a  rapid  motion  of  his  fork  just  before  he  began  to 
eat,  and  Miss  Bertha  Thomas  told  me  she  saw  an  Italian  lady 
at  Varallo  at  the  table-d'hote  cross  herself  with  her  fan.  I  do 
not  cross  myself  before  eating  nor  do  I  think  it  incumbent 
upon  me  to  kneel  down  on  the  hard  floor  in  church — per- 
haps because  I  am  not  an  English  bishop.  We  were  sorry 
for  this  one  and  for  his  young  lady,  but  it  was  their  own 
doing. 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  275 

We  then  went  into  the  Libreria  to  see  the  frescoes  by 
Pinturicchio — which  we  did  not  like — and  spent  some  little 
time  in  attending  to  them.  On  leaving  we  were  told  to  sign 
our  names  in  a  book  and  did  so.  As  we  were  going  out  we 
met  the  bishop  and  his  lady  coming  in ;  whether  they  had  been 
kneeling  all  the  time,  or  whether  they  had  got  up  as  soon  as 
we  were  gone  and  had  spent  the  time  in  looking  round  I  can- 
not say,  but,  when  they  had  seen  the  frescoes,  they  would  be 
told  to  sign  their  names  and,  when  they  signed,  they  would  see 
ours  and,  I  flatter  myself,  know  who  we  were. 

On  returning  to  our  hotel  we  were  able  to  collect  enough 
information  to  settle  in  our  own  minds  which  particular 
bishop  he  was. 

A  day  or  two  later  we  went  to  Poggibonsi,  which  must  have 
been  an  important  place  once;  nothing  but  the  walls  remain 
now,  the  city  within  them  having  been  razed  by  Charles  V. 
At  the  station  we  took  a  carriage,  and  our  driver,  Ulisse 
Pogni,  was  a  delightful  person,  second  baritone  at  the  Poggi- 
bonsi Opera  and  principal  fly-owner  of  the  town.  He  drove 
us  up  to  S.  Gimignano  and  told  us  that  the  people  still 
hold  the  figures  in  Benozzo  Gozzoli's  frescoes  to  be 
portraits  of  themselves  and  say :  "That's  me,"  and  "That's 
so  and  so." 

Of  course  we  went  to  see  the  frescoes,  and  as  we  were 
coming  down  the  main  street,  from  the  Piazza  on  which  the 
Municipio  stands,  who  should  be  mounting  the  incline  but  our 
bishop  and  his  lady.  The  moment  he  saw  us,  he  looked  cross, 
stood  still  and  began  inspecting  the  tops  of  the  houses  on  the 
other  side  of  the  street;  so  also  did  the  lady.  There  was 
nothing  of  the  smallest  interest  in  these  and  we  neither  of  us 
had  the  smallest  doubt  that  he  was  embarrassed  at  meeting 
us  and  was  pretending  not  to  notice  us.  I  have  seldom  seen 
any  like  attempt  more  clumsily  and  fatuously  done.  Whether 
he  was  saying  to  himself,  "Good  Lord !  that  wretch  will  be 
putting  my  kneeling  down  into  another  Alps  and  Sanctuaries 
or  Ex  Voto" ;  or  whether  it  was  only  that  we  were  a  couple  of 
blackguard  atheists  who  contaminated  the  air  all  round  us, 
I  cannot  tell ;  but  on  venturing  to  look  back  a  second  or  two 
after  we  had  passed  them,  the  bishop  and  the  lady  had  got  a 
considerable  distance  away. 

As  we  returned  our  driver  took  us  about  4  kilometres 


276      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

outside  Poggibonsi  to  San  Lucchese,  a  church  of  the  I2th 
or  1 3th  century,  greatly  decayed,  but  still  very  beautiful 
and  containing  a  few  naif  frescoes.  He  told  us  he  had  sung 
the  Sanctus  here  at  the  festa  on  the  preceding  Sunday.  In  a 
room  adjoining  the  church,  formerly,  we  were  told,  a  refec- 
tory, there  is  a  very  good  fresco  representing  the  "Miraculous 
Draught  of  Fishes"  by  Gerino  da  Pistoja  (I  think,  but  one 
forgets  these  names  at  once  unless  one  writes  them  down  then 
and  there).  It  is  dated — I  think  (again!) — about  1509,  be- 
trays the  influence  of  Perugino  but  is  more  lively  and  inter- 
esting than  anything  I  know  by  that  painter,  for  I  cannot 
call  him  master.  It  is  in  good  preservation  and  deserves  to 
be  better,  though  perhaps  not  very  much  better,  known  than  it 
is.  Our  driver  pointed  out  that  the  baskets  in  which  the  fishes 
are  being  collected  are  portraits  of  the  baskets  still  in  use  in 
the  neighbourhood. 

After  we  had  returned  to  London  we  found,  in  the  Royal 
Academy  Exhibition,  a  portrait  of  our  bishop  which,  though 
not  good,  was  quite  good  enough  to  assure  us  that  we  had  not 
been  mistaken  as  to  his  diocese. 


The  Etruscan  Urns  at  Volterra 

As  regards  the  way  in  which  the  Etruscan  artists  kept  to  a 
few  stock  subjects,  this  has  been  so  in  all  times  and  countries. 

When  Christianity  convulsed  the  world  and  displaced  the 
older  mythology,  she  did  but  introduce  new  subjects  of  her 
own',  to  which  her  artists  kept  as  closely  as  their  pagan  an- 
cestors had  kept  to  their  heathen  gods  and  goddesses.  We 
now  make  believe  to  have  freed  ourselves  from  these  tram- 
mels, but  the  departure  is  more  apparent  than  real.  Our 
works  of  art  fall  into  a  few  well-marked  groups  and  the  pic- 
tures of  each  group,  though  differing  in  detail,  present  the 
same  general  characters.  We  have,  however,  broken  much 
new  ground,  whereas  until  the  last  three  or  four  hundred 
years  it  almost  seems  either  as  if  artists  had  thought  subject 
a  detail  beneath  their  notice,  or  publics  had  insisted  on  being 
told  only  what  they  knew  already. 

The  principle  of  living  only  to  see  and  to  hear  some  new 
thing,  and  the  other  principle  of  avoiding  everything  with 
which  we  are  not  perfectly  familiar  are  equally  old,  equally 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  277 

universal,  equally  useful.  They  are  the  principles  of  con- 
servation and  accumulation  on  the  one  hand,  and  of  adven- 
ture, speculation  and  progress  on  the  other,  each  equally  indis- 
pensable. The  money  has  been,  and  will  probably  always  be 
more  persistently  in  the  hands  of  the  first  of  these  two  groups. 
But,  after  all,  is  not  money  an  art?  Nay,  is  it  not  the  most 
difficult  on  earth  and  the  parent  of  all?  And  if  life  is  short 
and  art  long,  is  not  money  still  longer  ?  And  are  not  works  of 
art,  for  the  most  part,  more  or  less  works  of  money  also?  In 
so  far  as  a  work  of  art  is  a  work  of  money,  it  must  not  com- 
plain of  being  bound  by  the  laws  of  money ;  in  so  far  as  it  is 
a  work  of  art,  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  money  and,  again, 
cannot  complain. 

It  is  a  great  help  to  the  spectator  to  know  the  subject  of  a 
picture  and  not  to  be  bothered  with  having  to  find  out  all 
about  the  story.  Subjects  should  be  such  as  either  tell  their 
own  story  instantly  on  the  face  of  them,  or  things  with  which 
all  spectators  may  be  supposed  familiar.  It  must  not  be  for- 
gotten that  a  work  exposed  to  public  view  is  addressed  to  a 
great  many  people  and  should  accordingly  consider  many 
people  rather  than  one.  I  saw  an  English  family  not  long 
since  looking  at  a  fine  collection  of  the  coins  of  all  nations. 
They  hardly  pretended  even  to  take  a  languid  interest  in  the 
French,  German,  Dutch  and  Italian  coins,  but  brightened  up 
at  once  on  being  shown  a  shilling,  a  florin  and  a  half-crown. 
So  children  do  not  want  new  stories ;  they  look  for  old  ones. 

"Mamma  dear,  will  you  please  tell  us  the  story  of  'The 
Three  Bears'?" 

"No,  my  love,  not  to-day,  I  have  told  it  you  very  often 
lately  and  I  am  busy." 

"Very  well,  Mamma  dear,  then  we  will  tell  you  the  story 
of  The  Three  Bears.' " 

The  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey  are  only  "The  Three  Bears" 
upon  a  larger  scale.  Just  as  the  life  of  a  man  is  only  the  fis- 
sion of  two  amoebas  on  a  larger  scale.  Cui  non  dictus  Hylcts 
puer  et  Latonia  Delosf  That  was  no  argument  against  telling 
it  again,  but  rather  for  repeating  it.  So  people  look  out  in  the 
newspapers  for  what  they  know  rather  than  for  what  they  do 
not  know,  and  the  better  they  know  it  the  more  interested 
they  are  to  see  it  in  print  and,  as  a  general  rule,  unless  they 
get  what  they  expect — or  think  they  know  already — they  are 


278      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

angry.  This  tendency  of  our  nature  culminates  in  the  well- 
known  lines  repeated  for  ever  and  ever : 

The  battle  of  the  Nile 
I  was  there  all  the  while; 
I  was  there  all  the  while 
At  the  battle  of  the  Nile. 
The  battle  of  ... 

And  so  on  ad  lib.  Even  this  will  please  very  young  children. 
As  they  grow  older  they  want  to  hear  about  nothing  but  "The 
Three  Bears."  As  they  mature  still  further  they  want  the 
greater  invention  and  freer  play  of  fancy  manifested  by  such 
people  as  Homer  and  our  west-end  upholsterers,  beyond  which 
there  is  no  liberty,  but  only  eccentricity  and  extravagance. 

So  it  is  with  all  fashion.  Fashions  change,  but  not  radically 
except  after  convulsion  and,  even  then,  the  change  is  more 
apparent  than  real,  the  older  fashions  continually  coming  back 
as  new  ones. 

So  it  is  not  only  as  regards  choice  of  subject  but  also  as 
regards  treatment  of  subject  within  the  limits  of  the  work 
itself,  after  the  subject  is  chosen.  No  matter  whether  the 
utterance  of  a  man's  inner  mind  is  attempted  by  way  of  words, 
painting,  or  music,  the  same  principle  underlies  all  these  three 
arts  and,  of  course,  also  those  arts  that  are  akin  to  them.  In 
each  case  a  man  should  have  but  one  subject  easily  recognis- 
able as  the  main  motive,  and  in  each  case  he  must  develop, 
treat  and  illustrate  this  by  means  of  episodes  and  details  that 
are  neither  so  alien  to  the  subject  as  to  appear  lugged  in  by 
the  heels,  nor  yet  so  germane  to  it  as  to  be  identical.  The 
treatment  grows  out  of  the  subject  as  the  family  from  the 
parents  and  the  race  from  the  family — each  new-born  member 
being  the  same  and  yet  not  the  same  with  those  that  have  pre- 
ceded him.  So  it  is  with  all  the  arts  and  all  the  sciences — 
they  flourish  best  by  the  addition  of  but  little  new  at  a  time  in 
comparison  with  the  old. 

And  so,  lastly,  it  is  with  the  ars  artium  itself,  that  art  of 
arts  and  science  of  sciences,  that  guild  of  arts  and  crafts 
which  is  comprised  within  each  one  of  us,  I  mean  our  bodies. 
In  the  detail  they  are  nourished  from  day  to  day  by  food 
which  must  not  be  too  alien  from  past  food  or  from  the  body 
itself,  nor  yet  too  germane  to  either ;  and  in  the  gross,  that  is 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  279 

to  say,  in  the  history  of  the  development  of  a  race  or  species, 
the  evolution  is  admittedly  for  the  most  part  exceedingly 
gradual,  by  means  of  many  generations,  as  it  were,  of  episodes 
that  are  kindred  to  and  yet  not  identical  with  the  subject. 

And  when  we  come  to  think  of  it,  we  find  in  the  evolution 
of  bodily  form  (which  along  with  modification  involves  per- 
sistence of  type)  the  explanation  why  persistence  of  type  in 
subjects  chosen  for  treatment  in  works  of  art  should  be  so 
universal.  It  is  because  we  are  so  averse  to  great  changes 
and  at  the  same  time  so  averse  to  no  change  at  all,  that  we 
have  a  bodily  form,  in  the  main,  persistent  and  yet,  at  the 
same  time,  capable  of  modifications.  Without  a  strong  aver- 
sion to  change  its  habits  and,  with  its  habits,  the  pabulum  of 
its  mind,  there  would  be  no  fixity  of  type  in  any  species  and, 
indeed,  there  would  be  no  life  at  all,  as  we  are  accustomed  to 
think  of  life,  for  organs  would  disappear  before  they  could  be 
developed,  and  to  try  to  build  life  on  such  a  shifting  founda- 
tion would  be  as  hopeless  as  it  would  be  to  try  and  build  a 
material  building  on  an  actual  quicksand.  Hence  the  habits, 
cries,  abodes,  food,  hopes  and  fears  of  each  species  (and  what 
are  these  but  the  realities  of  which  human  arts  are  as  the 
shadow?)  tell  the  same  old  tales  in  the  same  old  ways  from 
generation  to  generation,  and  it  is  only  because  they  do  so 
that  they  appear  to  us  as  species  at  all. 

Returning  now  to  the  Etruscan  cinerary  urns — I  have  no 
doubt  that,  perhaps  three  or  four  thousand  years  hence,  a 
collection  of  the  tombstones  from  some  of  our  suburban  ceme- 
teries will  be  thought  exceedingly  interesting,  but  I  confess 
to  having  found  the  urns  in  the  Museum  at  Volterra  a  little 
monotonous  and,  after  looking  at  about  three  urns,  I  hurried 
over  the  remaining  397  as  fast  as  I  could.  [1889.] 

The  Quick  and  the  Dead 

The  walls  of  the  houses  [in  an  Italian  village]  are  built  of 
brick  and  the  roofs  are  covered  with  stone.  They  call  the 
stone  "vivo."  It  is  as  though  they  thought  bricks  were  like 
veal  or  mutton  and  stones  like  bits  out  of  the  living  calf  or 
sheep.* 

*  Cf .  Wamba's  explanation  of  the  Saxon  swine  being  converted 
into  Norman  pork  on  their  death.  Ivanhoe,  Chap.  I. 


280      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

The  Grape-Filter 

When  the  water  of  a  place  is  bad,  it  is  safest  to  drink  none 
that  has  not  been  filtered  through  either  the  berry  of  a  grape, 
or  else  a  tub  of  malt.  These  are  the  most  reliable  filters  yet 
invented. 

Bertoli  and  his  Bees 

Giacomo  Bertoli  of  Varallo-Sesia  keeps  a  watch  and  clock 
shop  in  the  street.  He  is  a  cheery  little  old  gentleman,  though 
I  do  not  see  why  I  should  call  him  old  for  I  doubt  his  being  so 
old  as  I  am.  He  and  I  have  been  very  good  friends  for  years 
and  he  is  always  among  the  first  to  welcome  me  when  I  go  to 
Varallo. 

He  is  one  of  the  most  famous  bee-masters  in  Europe.  He 
keeps  some  of  his  bees  during  the  winter  at  Camasco  not  very 
far  from  Varallo,  others  in  other  places  near  and  moves  them 
up  to  Alagna,  at  the  head  of  the  Val  Sesia,  towards  the  end  of 
May  that  they  may  make  their  honey  from  the  spring  flowers 
— and  excellent  honey  they  make. 

About  a  fortnight  ago  I  happened  to  meet  him  bringing 
down  ten  of  his  hives.  He  was  walking  in  front  and  was  im- 
mediately followed  by  two  women  each  with  crates  on  their 
backs,  and  each  carrying  five  hives.  They  seemed  to  me  to  be 
ordinary  deal  boxes,  open  at  the  top,  but  covered  over  with 
gauze  which  would  keep  the  bees  in  but  not  exclude  air.  I 
asked  him  if  the  bees  minded  the  journey,  and  he  replied  that 
they  were  very  angry  and  had  a  great  deal  to  say  about  it; 
he  was  sure  to  be  stung  when  he  let  them  out.  He  said  it  was 
"un  lavoro  improbo,"  and  cost  him  a  great  deal  of  anxiety. 

"The  Lost  Chord" 

It  should  be  "The  Lost  Progression,"  for  the  young  lady 
was  mistaken  in  supposing  she  had  ever  heard  any  single 
chord  "like  the  sound  of  a  great  Amen."  Unless  we  are  to 
suppose  that  she  had  already  found  the  chord  of  C  Major  for 
the  final  syllable  of  the  word  and  was  seeking  the  chord  for 
the  first  syllable;  and  there  she  is  on  the  walls  of  a  Milanese 
restaurant  arpeggioing  experimental  harmonies  in  a  trans- 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  281 

port  of  delight  to  advertise  Somebody  and  Someone's  pianos 
and  holding  the  loud  pedal  solidly  down  all  the  time.  Her 
family  had  always  been  unsympathetic  about  her  music. 
They  said  it  was  like  a  loose  bundle  of  fire- wood  which  you 
never  can  get  across  the  room  without  dropping  sticks ;  they 
said  she  would  have  been  so  much  better  employed  doing  any- 
thing else. 

Fancy  being  in  the  room  with  her  while  she  was  strumming 
about  and  hunting  after  her  chord !  Fancy  being  in  heaven 
with  her  when  she  had  found  it ! 

Introduction  of  Foreign  Plants 

I  have  brought  back  this  year  some  mountain  auriculas  and 
the  seed  of  some  salvia  and  Fusio  tiger-lily,  and  mean  to 
plant  the  auriculas  and  to  sow  the  seeds  in  Epping  Forest  and 
elsewhere  round  about  London.  I  wish  people  would  more 
generally  bring  back  the  seeds  of  pleasing  foreign  plants  and 
introduce  them  broadcast,  sowing  them  by  our  waysides  and 
in  our  fields,  or  in  whatever  situation  is  most  likely  to  suit 
them.  It  is  true,  this  would  puzzle  botanists,  but  there  is  no 
reason  why  botanists  should  not  be  puzzled.  A  botanist  is  a 
person  whose  aim  is  to  uproot,  kill  and  exterminate  every 
plant  that  is  at  all  remarkable  for  rarity  or  any  special  virtue, 
and  the  rarer  it  is  the  more  bitterly  he  will  hunt  it  down. 

Saint  Cosimo  and  Saint  Damiano  at  Siena 

Sano  di  Pietro  shows  us  a  heartless  practical  joke  played  by 
these  two  very  naughty  saints,  both  medical  men,  who  should 
be  uncanonised  immediately.  It  seems  they  laid  their  heads 
together  and  for  some  reason,  best  known  to  themselves,  re- 
solved to  cut  a  leg  off  a  dead  negro  and  put  it  on  to  a  white 
man.  In  the  one  compartment  they  are  seen  in  high  glee 
cutting  the  negro's  leg  off.  In  the  next  they  have  gone  to  the 
white  man  who  is  in  bed,  obviously  asleep,  and  are  substitut- 
ing the  black  leg  for  his  own.  Then,  no  doubt,  they  will  stand 
behind  the  door  and  see  what  he  does  when  he  wakes.  They 
must  be  saints  because  they  have  glories  on,  but  it  looks  as 
though  a  glory  is  not  much  more  to  be  relied  on  than  a  gig  as 
a  test  of  respectability.  [1889.] 


282      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 


At  Pienza 

At  Pienza,  after  having  seen  the  Museum  with  a  custode 
whom  I  photoed  as  being  more  like  death,  though  in  excellent 
health  and  spirits,  than  any  one  I  ever  saw,  I  was  taken  to  the 
leading  college  for  young  ladies,  the  Conservatorio  di  S.  Carlo, 
under  the  direction  of  Signora  (or  Signorina,  I  do  not  know 
which)  Cesira  Carletti,  to  see  the  wonderful  Viale  of  the 
twelfth  or  thirteenth  century  given  to  Pienza  by  Pope  JSneas 
Sylvius  Piccolomini  (Pius  II)  and  stolen  a  few  years  since, 
but  recovered.  Signora  Carletti  was  copying  parts  of  it  in 
needlework,  nor  can  I  think  that  the  original  was  ever  better 
than  the  parts  which  she  had  already  done.  The  work  would 
take  weeks  or  even  months  to  examine  with  any  fullness,  and 
volumes  to  describe.  It  is  as  prodigal  of  labour,  design  and 
colour  as  nature  herself  is.  In  fact  it  is  one  of  those  things 
that  nature  has  a  right  to  do  but  not  art.  It  fatigues  one  to 
look  at  it  or  think  upon  it  and,  bathos  though  it  be  to  say  so, 
it  won  the  first  prize  at  the  Exhibitions  of  Ecclesiastical  Art 
Work  held  a  few  years  ago  at  Rome  and  at  Siena.  It  has 
taken  Signora  Carletti  months  to  do  even  the  little  she  has 
done,  but  that  little  must  be  seen  to  be  believed,  for  no  words 
can  do  justice  to  it. 

Having  seen  the  Viale,  I  was  shown  round  the  whole  estab- 
lishment, and  can  imagine  nothing  better  ordered.  I  was 
taken  over  the  dormitories — very  nice  and  comfortable — and, 
finally,  not  without  being  much  abashed,  into  the  room  where 
the  young  ladies  were  engaged  upon  needlework.  It  reminded 
me  of  nothing  so  much  as  of  the  Education  of  the  Virgin 
Chapel  at  Oropa.*  I  was  taken  to  each  young  lady  and  did 
my  best  to  acquit  myself  properly  in  praising  her  beautiful 
work  but,  beautiful  as  the  work  of  one  and  all  was,  it  could 
not  compare  with  that  of  Signora  Carletti.  I  asked  her  if  she 
could  not  get  some  of  the  young  ladies  to  help  her  in  the  less 
important  parts  of  her  work,  but  she  said  she  preferred  doing 
it  all  herself.  They  all  looked  well  and  happy  and  as  though 
they  were  well  cared  for,  as  I  am  sure  they  are. 

Then  Signora  Carletti  took  me  to  the  top  of  the  house  to 
show  me  the  meteorological  room  of  which  she  is  superin- 

*  See  "A  Medieval  Girl  School"  in  Essays  on  Life,  Art  &  Science. 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  283 

tendent,  and  which  is  in  connection  with  the  main  meteoro- 
logical observatory  at  Rome.  Again  I  found  everything  in 
admirable  order,  and  left  the  house  not  a  little  pleased  and 
impressed  with  everything  I  had  seen.  [1889.] 

Homer's  Hot  and  Cold  Springs 
The  following  extract  is  taken  from  a  memorandum  Butler 
made  of  a  visit  he  paid  to  Greece  and  the  Troad  in  the  spring 
of  1895.  In  the  Iliad  (xxii.  145)  Homer  mentions  hot  and 
cold  springs  where  the  Trojan  women  used  to  wash  their 
clothes.  There  are  no  such  springs  near  Hissarlik,  where  they 
ought  to  be,  but  the  American  Consul  at  the  Dardanelles  told 
Butler  there  was  something  of  the  kind  on  Mount  Ida,  at  the 
sources  of  the  Scamander,  and  he  determined  to  see  them  after 
visiting  Hissarlik.  He  was  provided  with  an  interpreter,  Ya- 
koub,  an  attendant,  Ahmed,  an  escort  of  one  soldier  and  a 
horse.  He  went  first  to  the  Consul's  farm  at  Thymbra,  about 
•five  miles  from  Hissarlik,  where  he  spent  the  night  and  found 
it  "all  very  like  a  first-class  New  Zealand  sheep-station."  The 
next  day  he  went  to  Hissarlik  and  saw  no  reason  for  disagree- 
ing with  the  received  opinion  that  it  is  the  site  of  Troy.  He 
then  proceeded  to  Bunarbashi  and  so  to  B'airemitch,  passing 
on  the  way  a  saw-mill  where  there  was  a  Government  official 
with  twenty  soldiers  under  him.  This  official  was  much  inter- 
ested in  the  traveller  and  directed  his  men  to  take  carpets  and 
a  dish  of  trout,  caught  that  morning  in  the  Scamander,  and 
carry  them  up  to  the  hot  and  cold  springs  while  he  himself 
accompanied  Butler.  So  they  set  off  and  the  official,  Ismail, 
showed  him  the  way  and  pointed  out  the  springs,  and  there  is 
a  long  note  about  the  hot  and  cold  water. 

And  now  let  me  return  to  Ismail  Gusbashi,  the  excellent 
Turkish  official  who,  by  the  way,  was  with  me  during  all  my 
examination  of  the  springs,  and  whose  assurances  of  their 
twofold  temperature  I  should  have  found  it  impossible  to 
doubt,  even  though  I  had  not  caught  one  warmer  cupful 
myself.  His  men,  while  we  were  at  the  springs,  had  spread  a 
large  Turkey  carpet  on  the  flower-bespangled  grass  under  the 
trees,  and  there  were  three  smaller  rugs  at  three  of  the  cor- 
ners. On  these  Ismail  and  Yakoub  and  I  took  our  places. 
The  other  two  were  cross-legged,  but  I  reclining  anyhow.  The 
sun  shimmered  through  the  spring  foliage.  I  saw  two  hoopoes 


284      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

and  many  beautiful  birds  whose  names  I  knew  not.  Through 
the  trees  I  could  see  the  snow-fields  of  Ida  far  above  me,  but 
it  was  hopeless  to  think  of  reaching  them.  The  soldiers  and 
Ahmed  cooked  the  trout  and  the  eggs  all  together;  then  we 
had  boiled  eggs,  bread  and  cheese  and,  of  course,  more  lamb's 
liver  done  on  skewers  like  cats'  meat.  I  ate  with  my  pocket- 
knife,  the  others  using  their  fingers  in  true  Homeric  fashion. 

When  we  had  put  from  us  "the  desire  of  meat  and  drink," 
Ismail  began  to  talk  to  me.  He  said  he  had  now  for  the  first 
time  in  his  life  found  himself  in  familiar  conversation  with 
Wisdom  from  the  West  (that  was  me),  and  that,  as  he  greatly 
doubted  whether  such  another  opportunity  would  be  ever 
vouchsafed  to  him,  he  should  wish  to  consult  me  upon  a 
matter  which  had  greatly  exercised  him.  He  was  now  fifty 
years  old  and  had  never  married.  Sometimes  he  thought  he 
had  done  a  wise  thing,  and  sometimes  it  seemed  to  him  that 
he  had  been  very  foolish.  Would  I  kindly  tell  him  which  it 
was  and  advise  him  as  to  the  future  ?  I  said  he  was  address- 
ing one  who  was  in  much  the  same  condition  as  himself,  only 
that  I  was  some  ten  years  older.  We  had  a  saying  in  England 
that  if  a  man  marries  he  will  regret  it,  and  that  if  he  does  not 
marry  he  will  regret  it. 

"Ah !"  said  Ismail,  who  was  leaning  towards  me  and  trying 
to  catch  every  word  I  spoke,  though  he  could  not  understand 
a  syllable  till  Yakoub  interpreted  my  Italian  into  Turkish. 
"Ah !"  he  said,  "that  is  a  true  word." 

In  my  younger  days,  I  said  (may  Heaven  forgive  me!),  I 
had  been  passionately  in  love  with  a  most  beautiful  young 
lady,  but — and  here  my  voice  faltered,  and  I  looked  very  sad, 
waiting  for  Yakoub  to  interpret  what  I  had  said — but  it  had 
been  the  will  of  Allah  that  she  should  marry  another  gentle- 
man, and  this  had  broken  my  heart  for  many  years.  After  a 
time,  however,  I  concluded  that  these  things  were  all  settled 
for  us  by  a  higher  Power. 

"Ah !  that  is  a  true  word." 

"And  so,  my  dear  sir,  in  your  case  I  should  reflect  that  if 
Allah"  (and  I  raised  my  hand  to  Heaven)  "had  desired  your 
being  married,  he  would  have  signified  his  will  to  you  in  some 
way  that  you  could  hardly  mistake.  As  he  does  not  appear  to 
have  done  so,  I  should  recommend  you  to  remain  single  until 
you  receive  some  distinct  intimation  that  you  are  to  marry." 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  285 

"Ah !  that  is  a  true  word." 

"Besides,"  I  continued,  "suppose  you  marry  a  woman  with 
whom  you  think  you  are  in  love  and  then  find  out,  after  you 
have  been  married  to  her  for  three  months,  that  you  do  not 
like  her.  This  would  be  a  very  painful  situation." 

"Ah,  yes,  indeed !  that  is  a  true  word." 

"And  if  you  had  children  who  were  good  and  dutiful,  it 
would  be  delightful ;  but  suppose  they  turned  out  disobedient 
and  ungrateful — and  I  have  known  many  such  cases — could 
anything  be  more  distressing  to  a  parent  in  his  declining 
years  ?" 

"Ah !  that  is  a  true  word  that  you  have  spoken." 

"We  have  a  great  Imaum,"  I  continued,  "in  England;  he 
is  called  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  and  gives  answers  to 
people  who  are  in  any  kind  of  doubt  or  difficulty.  I  knew  one 
gentleman  who  asked  his  advice  upon  the  very  question  that 
you  have  done  me  the  honour  of  propounding  to  myself." 

"Ah !  and  what  was  his  answer  ?" 

"He  told  him,"  said  I,  "that  it  was  cheaper  to  buy  the 
milk  than  to  keep  a  cow." 

"Ah !  ah !  that  is  a  most  true  word." 

Here  I  closed  the  conversation,  and  we  began  packing  up 
to  make  a  start.  When  we  were  about  to  mount,  I  said  to 
him,  hat  in  hand : 

"Sir,  it  occurs  to  me  with  great  sadness  that,  though  you 
will,  no  doubt,  often  revisit  this  lovely  spot,  yet  it  is  most 
certain  that  I  shall  never  do  so.  Promise  me  that  when  you 
come  here  you  will  sometimes  think  of  the  stupid  old  English- 
man who  has  had  the  pleasure  of  lunching  with  you  to-day, 
and  I  promise  that  I  will  often  think  of  you  when  I  am  at 
home  again  in  London." 

He  was  much  touched,  and  we  started.  After  we  had  gone 
about  a  mile,  I  suddenly  missed  my  knife.  I  knew  I  should 
want  it  badly  many  a  time  before  we  got  to  the  Dardanelles, 
and  I  knew  perfectly  well  where  I  should  find  it :  so  I  stopped 
the  cavalcade  and  said  I  must  ride  back  for  it.  I  did  so,  found 
it  immediately  and  returned.  Then  I  said  to  Ismail : 

"Sir,  I  understand  now  why  I  was  led  to  leave  my  knife 
behind  me.  I  had  said  it  was  certain  I  should  never  see  that 
enchanting  spot  again,  but  I  spoke  presumptuously,  forgetting 
that  if  Allah"  (and  I  raised  my  hand  to  Heaven)  "willed  it  I 


286      Material  for  a  Projected  Sequel 

should  assuredly  do  so.  I  am  corrected,  and  with  great 
leniency." 

Ismail  was  much  affected.  The  good  fellow  immediately 
took  off  his  watch-chain  (happily  of  brass  and  of  no  intrinsic 
value)  and  gave  it  me,  assuring  me  that  it  was  given  him  by  a 
very  dear  friend,  that  he  had  worn  it  for  many  years,  and 
valued  it  greatly — would  I  keep  it  as  a  memorial  of  himself? 
Fortunately  I  had  with  me  a  little  silver  match-box  which 
Alfred  had  given  me  and  which  had  my  name  engraved  on  it. 
I  gave  it  to  him,  but  had  some  difficulty  in  making  him  accept 
it.  Then  we  rode  on  till  we  came  to  the  saw-mills.  I  ordered 
two  lambs  for  the  ten  soldiers  who  had  accompanied  us, 
having  understood  from  Yakoub  that  this  would  be  an  ac- 
ceptable present.  And  so  I  parted  from  this  most  kind  and 
friendly  gentleman  with  every  warm  expression  of  cordiality 
on  both  sides. 

I  sent  him  his  photograph  which  I  had  taken,  and  I  sent 
his  soldiers  their  groups  also — one  for  each  man — and  in  due 
course  I  received  the  following  letter  of  thanks.  Alas!  I 
have  never  written  in  answer.  I  knew  not  how  to  do  it.  I 
knew,  however,  that  I  could  not  keep  up  a  correspondence, 
even  though  I  wrote  once.  But  few  unanswered  letters  more 
often  rise  up  and  smite  me.  How  the  Post  Office  people  ever 
read  "Bueter,  Ciforzin  St."  into  "Butler,  Clifford's  Inn"  I 
cannot  tell.  What  splendid  emendators  of  a  corrupt  text 
they  ought  to  make !  But  I  could  almost  wish  that  they  had 
failed,  for  it  has  pained  me  not  a  little  that  I  have  not  replied. 

Mr.  Samuel  Bueter, 

No.  15  Ciforzin  St.  London,  England. 

Dardanelles, 

August  4/95. 
Mr.  Samuel.    England. 
MY  DEAR  FRIEND, 

Many  thanks  for  the  photograph  you  have  send  me. 
It  was  very  kind  of  you  to  think  of  me  to  send  me  this  token 
of  your  remembrance.  I  certainly  appreciate  it,  and  shall 
think  of  you  whenever  I  look  at  it.  Ah  My  Dear  Brother,  it  is 
impossible  for  me  to  forget  you.  under  favorable  circumstance 
I  confess  I  must  prefer  you.  I  have  a  grate  desire  to  have  the 


to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  287 

beautifull  chance  to  meet  you.  Ah  then  with  the  tears  of 
gladness  to  be  the  result  of  the  great  love  of  our  friendness 
A  my  Sir  what  pen  can  describe  the  meeting  that  shall  be 
come  with  your  second  visit  if  it  please  God. 

It  is  my  pray  to  Our  Lord  God  to  protect  you  and  to  keep 
you  glad  and  happy  for  ever. 

Though  we  are  far  from  each  other  yet  we  can  speak  with 
letters. 

Thank  God  to  have  your  love  of  friendness  with  me  and 
mine  with  your  noble  person. 
Hopeing  to  hear  from  you, 

Yours  truly, 

ISMAYEL,  from 
Byramich  hizar  memuerue  iuse  bashi. 


XVIII 
Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited 


APOLOGISE  for  the  names  in  Erewhon.    I  was  an  unpractised 
writer  and  had  no  idea  the  names  could  matter  so  much. 

Give  a  map  showing  the  geography  of  Erewhon  in  so  far  as 
the  entrance  into  the  country  goes,  and  explain  somewhere,  if 
possible,  about  Butler's  stones. 

Up  as  far  as  the  top  of  the  pass,  where  the  statues  are, 
keeps  to  the  actual  geography  of  the  upper  Rangitata  district 
except  that  I  have  doubled  the  gorge.  There  was  no  gorge  up 
above  my  place  [Mesopotamia]  and  I  wanted  one,  so  I  took 
the  gorge  some  10  or  a  dozen  miles  lower  down  and  repeated 
it  and  then  came  upon  my  own  country  again,  but  made  it  bare 
of  grass  and  useless  instead  of  (as  it  actually  was)  excellent 
country.  Baker  and  I  went  up  the  last  saddle  we  tried  and 
thought  it  was  a  pass  to  the  West  Coast,  but  found  it  looked 
down  on  to  the  headwaters  of  the  Rakaia :  however  we  saw  a 
true  pass  opposite,  just  as  I  have  described  in  Erewhon,  only 
that  there  were  no  clouds  and  we  never  went  straight  down  as 
I  said  I  did,  but  took  two  days  going  round  by  Lake  Heron. 
And  there  is  no  lake  at  the  top  of  the  true  pass.  This  is  the 
pass  over  which,  in  consequence  of  our  report,  Whitcombe 
was  sent  and  got  drowned  on  the  other  side.  We  went  up  to 
the  top  of  the  pass  but  found  it  too  rough  to  go  down  without 
more  help  than  we  had.  I  rather  think  I  have  told  this  in  A 
First  Year  in  Canterbury  Settlement,  but  am  so  much  ashamed 
of  that  book  that  I  dare  not  look  to  see.  I  don't  mean  to  say 
that  the  later  books  are  much  better ;  still  they  are  better. 

They  show  a  lot  of  stones  on  the  Hokitika  pass,  so  Mr. 
Slade  told  me,  which  they  call  mine  and  say  I  intended  them 

288 


Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited      289 

in  Erewhon  [for  the  statues].    I  never  saw  them  and  knew 
nothing  about  them. 

Refer  to  the  agony  and  settled  melancholy  with  which 
unborn  children  in  the  womb  regard  birth  as  the  extinction  of 
their  being,  and  how  some  declare  that  there  is  a  world  beyond 
the  womb  and  others  deny  this.  "We  must  all  one  day  be 
born,"  "Birth  is  certain"  and  so  on,  just  as  we  say  of  death. 
Birth  involves  with  it  an  original  sin.  It  must  be  sin,  for  the 
wages  of  sin  is  death  (what  else,  I  should  like  to  know,  is  the 
wages  of  virtue  ?)  and  assuredly  the  wages  of  birth  is  death. 

They  consider  "wilful  procreation,"  as  they  call  it,  much 
as  we  do  murder  and  will  not  allow  it  to  be  a  moral  ailment  at 
all.  Sometimes  a  jury  will  recommend  to  mercy  and  some- 
times they  bring  in  a  verdict  of  "justifiable  baby-getting,"  but 
they  treat  these  cases  as  a  rule  with  great  severity. 

Every  baby  has  a  month  of  heaven  and  a  month  of  hell 
before  birth,  so  that  it  may  make  its  choice  with  its  eyes  open. 

The  hour  of  birth  should  be  prayed  for  in  the  litany  as  well 
as  that  of  death,  and  so  it  would  be  if  we  could  remember  the 
agony  of  horror  which,  no  doubt,  we  felt  at  birth — surpassing, 
no  doubt,  the  utmost  agony  of  apprehension  that  can  be  felt 
on  death. 

Let  automata  increase  in  variety  and  ingenuity  till  at  last 
they  present  so  many  of  the  phenomena  of  life  that  the 
religious  world  declares  they  were  designed  and  created  by 
God  as  an  independent  species.  The  scientific  world,  on  the 
other  hand,  denies  that  there  is  any  design  in  connection  with 
them,  and  holds  that  if  any  slight  variation  happened  to 
arise  by  which  a  fortuitous  combination  of  atoms  occurred 
which  was  more  suitable  for  advertising  purposes  (the  auto- 
mata were  chiefly  used  for  advertising)  it  was  seized  upon 
and  preserved  by  natural  selection. 

They  have  schools  where  they  teach  the  arts  of  forgetting 
and  of  not  seeing.  Young  ladies  are  taught  the  art  of  pro- 
posing. Lists  of  successful  matches  are  advertised  with  the 
prospectuses  of  all  the  girls'  schools. 

They  have  professors  of  all  the  languages  of  the  principal 
beasts  and  birds.  I  stayed  with  the  Professor  of  Feline  Lan- 


290      Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited 

guages  who  had  invented  a  kind  of  Ollendorffian  system  for 
teaching  the  Art  of  Polite  Conversation  among  cats. 

They  have  an  art-class  in  which  the  first  thing  insisted  on 
is  that  the  pupils  should  know  the  price  of  all  the  leading 
modern  pictures  that  have  been  sold  during  the  last  twenty 
years  at  Christie's,  and  the  fluctuations  in  their  values.  Give 
an  examination  paper  on  this  subject.  The  artist  being  a 
picture-dealer,  the  first  thing  he  must  do  is  to  know  how  to 
sell  his  pictures,  and  therefore  how  to  adapt  them  to  the 
market.  What  is  the  use  of  being  able  to  paint  a  picture 
unless  one  can  sell  it  when  one  has  painted  it  ? 

Add  that  the  secret  of  the  success  of  modern  French  art 
lies  in  its  recognition  of  values. 

Let  there  be  monks  who  have  taken  vows  of  modest  com- 
petency (about  £1000  a  year,  derived  from  consols),  who 
spurn  popularity  as  medieval  monks  spurned  money — and 
with  about  as  much  sincerity.  Their  great  object  is  to  try  and 
find  out  what  they  like  and  then  get  it.  They  do  not  live  in 
one  building,  and  there  are  no  vows  of  celibacy,  but,  in  prac- 
tice, when  any  member  marries  he  drifts  away  from  the 
society.  They  have  no  profession  of  faith  or  articles  of  asso- 
ciation, but,  as  they  who  hunted  for  the  Holy  Grail,  so  do 
these  hunt  in  all  things,  whether  of  art  or  science,  for  that 
which  commends  itself  to  them  as  comfortable  and  worthy 
to  be  accepted.  Their  liberty  of  thought  and  speech  and  their 
reasonable  enjoyment  of  the  good  things  of  this  life  are  what 
they  alone  live  for. 

Let  the  Erewhonians  have  Westminster  Abbeys  of  the 
first,  second  and  third  class,  and  in  one  of  these  let  them  raise 
monuments  to  dead  theories  which  were  once  celebrated. 

Let  them  study  those  arts  whereby  the  opinions  of  a  minor- 
ity may  be  made  to  seem  those  of  a  majority. 

Introduce  an  Erewhonian  sermon  to  the  effect  that  if  peo- 
ple are  wicked  they  may  perhaps  have  to  go  to  heaven  when 
they  die. 

Let  them  have  a  Regius  Professor  of  Studied  Ambiguity. 

Let  the  Professor  of  Worldly  Wisdom  pluck  a  man  for 
want  of  sufficient  vagueness  in  his  saving-clauses  paper. 

Another  poor  fellow  may  be  floored  for  having  written 
an  article  on  a  scientific  subject  without  having  made  free 
enough  use  of  the  words  "patiently"  and  "carefully,"  and 


Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited      291 

for  having  shown  too  obvious  signs  of  thinking  for 
himself. 

Let  them  attach  disgrace  to  any  who  do  not  rapidly  become 
obscure  after  death. 

Let  them  have  a  Professor  of  Mischief.  They  found  that 
people  always  did  harm  when  they  meant  well  and  that  all  the 
professorships  founded  with  an  avowedly  laudable  object 
failed,  so  they  aim  at  mischief  in  the  hope  that  they  may  miss 
the  mark  here  as  when  they  aimed  at  what  they  thought 
advantageous. 

The  Professor  of  Worldly  Wisdom  plucked  a  man  for  buy- 
ing an  egg  that  had  a  date  stamped  upon  it.  And  another  for 
being  too  often  and  too  seriously  in  the  right.  And  another 
for  telling  people  what  they  did  not  want  to  know.  He 
plucked  several  for  insufficient  mistrust  in  printed  matter. 
It  appeared  that  the  Professor  had  written  an  article  teeming 
with  plausible  blunders,  and  had  had  it  inserted  in  a  leading 
weekly.  He  then  set  his  paper  so  that  the  men  were  sure  to 
tumble  into  these  blunders  themselves ;  then  he  plucked  them. 
This  occasioned  a  good  deal  of  comment  at  the  time. 

One  man  who  entered  for  the  Chancellor's  medal  declined 
to  answer  any  of  the  questions  set.  He  said  he  saw  they  were 
intended  more  to  show  off  the  ingenuity  of  the  examiner  than 
either  to  assist  or  test  the  judgment  of  the  examined.  He 
observed,  moreover,  that  the  view  taken  of  his  answers  would 
in  great  measure  depend  upon  what  the  examiner  had  had  for 
dinner  and,  since  it  was  not  in  his  power  to  control  this,  he 
was  not  going  to  waste  time  where  the  result  was,  at  best,  so 
much  a  matter  of  chance.  Briefly,  his  view  of  life  was  that 
the  longer  you  lived  and  the  less  you  thought  or  talked  about 
it  the  better.  He  should  go  pretty  straight  in  the  main  himself 
because  it  saved  trouble  on  the  whole,  and  he  should  be  guided 
mainly  by  a  sense  of  humour  in  deciding  when  to  deviate  from 
the  path  of  technical  honesty,  and  he  would  take  care  that  his 
errors,  if  any,  should  be  rather  on  the  side  of  excess  than  of 
asceticism. 

This  man  won  the  Chancellor's  medal. 

They  have  a  review  class  in  which  the  pupils  are  taught  not 
to  mind  what  is  written  in  newspapers.  As  a  natural  result 
they  grow  up  more  keenly  sensitive  than  ever. 

Round  the  margin  of  the  newspapers  sentences  are  printed 


292      Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited 

cautioning  the  readers  against  believing  the  criticisms  they 
see,  inasmuch  as  personal  motives  will  underlie  the  greater 
number. 

They  defend  the  universities  and  academic  bodies  on  the 
ground  that,  but  for  them,  good  work  would  be  so  universal 
that  the  world  would  become  clogged  with  masterpieces  to  an 
extent  that  would  reduce  it  to  an  absurdity.  Good  sense 
would  rule  over  all,  and  merely  smart  or  clever  people  would 
be  unable  to  earn  a  living. 

They  assume  that  truth  is  best  got  at  by  the  falling  out  of 
thieves.  "Well  then,  there  must  be  thieves,  or  how  can  they 
fall  out?  Our  business  is  to  produce  the  raw  material  from 
which  truth  may  be  elicited." 

"And  you  succeed,  sir,"  I  replied,  "in  a  way  that  is  beyond 
all  praise,  and  it  seems  as  though  there  would  be  no  limit  to 
the  supply  of  truth  that  ought  to  be  available.  But,  consider- 
ing the  number  of  your  thieves,  they  show  less  alacrity  in 
flying  at  each  other's  throats  than  might  have  been  expected." 

They  live  their  lives  backwards,  beginning,  as  old  men  and 
women,  with  little  more  knowledge  of  the  past  than  we  have 
of  the  future,  and  foreseeing  the  future  about  as  clearly  as  we 
see  the  past,  winding  up  by  entering  into  the  womb  as  though 
being  buried.  But  delicacy  forbids  me  to  pursue  this  subject 
further :  the  upshot  is  that  it  comes  to  much  the  same  thing, 
provided  one  is  used  to  it. 

Paying  debts  is  a  luxury  which  we  cannot  all  of  us  afford. 
"It  is  not  every  one,  my  dear,  who  can  reach  such  a  counsel 
of  perfection  as  murder." 

There  was  no  more  space  for  the  chronicles  and,  what  was 
worse,  there  was  no  more  space  in  which  anything  could  hap- 
pen at  all,  the  whole  land  had  become  one  vast  cancerous 
growth  of  chronicles,  chronicles,  chronicles,  nothing  but 
chronicles. 

The  catalogue  of  the  Browne  medals  alone  will  in  time  come 
to  occupy  several  hundreds  of  pages  in  the  University  Cal- 
endar. 

There  was  a  professor  who  was  looked  upon  as  such  a 
valuable  man  because  he  had  done  more  than  any  other 
living  person  to  suppress  any  kind  of  originality. 


Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited      293 

"It  is  not  our  business,"  he  used  to  say,  "to  help  students 
to  think  for  themselves — surely  this  is  the  very  last  thing  that 
one  who  wishes  them  well  would  do  by  them.  Our  business  is 
to  make  them  think  as  we  do,  or  at  any  rate  as  we  consider  it 
expedient  to  say  we  do." 

He  was  President  of  the  Society  for  the  Suppression  of 
Useless  Knowledge  and  for  the  Complete  Obliteration  of  the 
Past. 

They  have  professional  mind-dressers,  as  we  have  hair- 
dressers, and  before  going  out  to  dinner  or  fashionable  At- 
homes,  people  go  and  get  themselves  primed  with  smart  say- 
ings or  moral  reflections  according  to  the  style  which  they 
think  will  be  most  becoming  to  them  in  the  kind  of  company 
they  expect. 

They  deify  as  God  something  which  I  can  only  translate  by 
a  word  as  underivable  as  God — I  mean  Gumption.  But  it  is 
part  of  their  religion  that  there  should  be  no  temple  to  Gump- 
tion, nor  are  there  priests  or  professors  of  Gumption.  Gump- 
tion being  too  ineffable  to  hit  the  sense  of  human  definition 
and  analysis. 

They  hold  that  the  function  of  universities  is  to  make  learn- 
ing repellent  and  thus  to  prevent  its  becoming  dangerously 
common.  And  they  discharge  this  beneficent  function  all  the 
more  efficiently  because  they  do  it  unconsciously  and  auto- 
matically. The  professors  think  they  are  advancing  healthy 
intellectual  assimilation  and  digestion  when  they  are  in  reality 
little  better  than  cancer  on  the  stomach. 

Let  them  be  afflicted  by  an  epidemic  of  the  fear-of-giving- 
themselves-away  disease.  Enumerate  its  symptoms.  There 
is  a  new  discovery  whereby  the  invisible  rays  that  emanate 
from  the  soul  can  be  caught  and  all  the  details  of  a  man's 
spiritual  nature,  his  character,  disposition,  principles,  &c.  be 
photographed  on  a  plate  as  easily  as  his  face  or  the  bones  of 
his  hands,  but  no  cure  for  the  f.  o.  g.  th.  a.  disease  has  yet 
been  discovered. 

They  have  a  company  for  ameliorating  the  condition  of 
those  who  are  in  a  future  state,  and  for  improving  the  future 
state  itself. 

People  are  buried  alive  for  a  week  before  they  are  married 


294      Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited 

so  that  their  offspring  may  know  something  about  the  grave, 
of  which,  otherwise,  heredity  could  teach  it  nothing. 

It  has  long  been  held  that  those  constitutions  are  best 
which  promote  most  effectually  the  greatest  happiness  of  the 
greatest  number.  Now  the  greatest  number  are  none  too  wise 
and  none  too  honest,  and  to  arrange  our  systems  with  a  view 
to  the  greater  happiness  of  sensible  straightforward  people — 
indeed  to  give  these  people  a  chance  at  all  if  it  can  be  avoided 
— is  to  interfere  with  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number.  Dull,  slovenly  and  arrogant  people  do  not  like  those 
who  are  quick,  painstaking  and  unassuming;  how  can  we 
then  consistently  with  the  first  principles  of  either  morality 
or  political  economy  encourage  such  people  when  we  can 
bring  sincerity  and  modesty  fairly  home  to  them? 

Much -we  have  to  tolerate,  partly  because  we  cannot  always 
discover  in  time  who  are  really  insincere  and  who  are  only 
masking  sincerity  under  a  garb  of  flippancy,  and  partly  also 
because  we  wish  to  err  on  the  side  of  letting  the  guilty  escape 
rather  than  of  punishing  the  innocent.  Thus  many  people 
who  are  perfectly  well  known  to  belong  to  the  straightforward 
class  are  allowed  to  remain  at  large  and  may  even  be  seen 
hobnobbing  and  on  the  best  of  possible  terms  with  the  guar- 
dians of  public  immorality.  We  all  feel,  as  indeed  has  been 
said  in  other  nations,  that  the  poor  abuses  of  the  time  want 
countenance,  and  this  moreover  in  the  interests  of  the  uses 
themselves,  for  the  presence  of  a  small  modicum  of  sincerity 
acts  as  a  wholesome  stimulant  and  irritant  to  the  prevailing 
spirit  of  academicism;  moreover,  we  hold  it  useful  to  have 
a  certain  number  of  melancholy  examples  whose  notorious 
failure  shall  serve  as  a  warning  to  those  who  do  not  cultivate 
a  power  of  immoral  self-control  which  shall  prevent  them 
from  saying,  or  indeed  even  thinking,  anything  that  shall  not 
be  to  their  immediate  and  palpable  advantage  with  the  great- 
est number. 

It  is  a  point  of  good  breeding  with  the  Erewhonians  to  keep 
their  opinions  as  far  as  possible  in  the  background  in  all  cases 
where  controversy  is  even  remotely  possible,  that  is  to  say 
whenever  conversation  gets  beyond  the  discussion  of  the 
weather.  It  is  found  necessary,  however,  to  recognise  some 
means  of  ventilating  points  on  which  differences  of  opinion 


Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited      295 

may  exist,  and  the  convention  adopted  is  that  whenever  a 
man  finds  occasion  to  speak  strongly  he  should  express  him- 
self by  dwelling  as  forcibly  as  he  can  on  the  views  most  op- 
posed to  his  own ;  even  this,  however,  is  tolerated  rather  than 
approved,  for  it  is  counted  the  perfection  of  scholarship  and 
good  breeding  not  to  express,  and  much  more  not  even  to 
have  a  definite  opinion  upon  any  subject  whatsoever. 

Thus  their  "yea"  is  "nay"  and  their  "nay,"  "yea,"  but 
it  comes  to  the  same  thing  in  the  end,  for  it  does  not  matter 
whether  "yea"  is  called  "yea"  or  "nay"  so  long  as  it  is 
understood  as  "yea."  They  go  a  long  way  round  only  to  find 
themselves  at  the  point  from  which  they  started,  but  there  is 
no  accounting  for  tastes.  With  us  such  tactics  are  incon-. 
ceivable,  but  so  far  do  the  Erewhonians  carry  them  that  it  is 
common  for  them  to  write  whole  reviews  and  articles  between 
the  lines  of  which  a  practised  reader  will  detect  a  sense  exactly 
contrary  to  that  ostensibly  put  forward ;  nor  is  a  man  held 
to  be  more  than  a  tyro  in  the  arts  of  polite  society  unless  he 
instinctively  suspects  a  hidden  sense  in  every  proposition 
that  meets  him.  I  was  more  than  once  misled  by  these 
plover-like  tactics,  and  on  one  occasion  was  near  getting  into 
a  serious  scrape.  It  happened  thus : — 

A  man  of  venerable  aspect  was  maintaining  that  pain  was  a 
sad  thing  and  should  not  be  permitted  under  any  circum- 
stances. People  ought  not  even  to  be  allowed  to  suffer  for  the 
consequences  of  their  own  folly,  and  should  be  punished  for  it 
severely  if  they  did.  If  they  could  only  be  kept  from  making 
fools  of  themselves  by  the  loss  of  freedom  or,  if  necessary,  by 
some  polite  and  painless  method  of  extinction — which  meant 
hanging — then  they  ought  to  be  extinguished.  If  permanent 
improvement  can  only  be  won  through  ages  of  mistake  and 
suffering,  which  must  be  all  begun  de  novo  for  every  fresh  im- 
provement, let  us  be  content  to  forego  improvement,  and  let 
those  who  suffer  their  lawless  thoughts  to  stray  in  this  direc- 
tion be  improved  from  off  the  face  of  the  earth  as  fast  as 
possible.  No  remedy  can  be  too  drastic  for  such  a  disease  as 
the  pain  felt  by  another  person.  We  find  we  can  generally 
bear  the  pain  ourselves  when  we  have  to  do  so,  but  it  is  in- 
tolerable that  we  should  know  it  is  being  borne  by  any  one 
else.  The  mere  sight  of  pain  unfits  people  for  ordinary  life, 
the  wear  and  tear  of  which  would  be  very  much  reduced  if  we 


296     Material  for  Erewhon  Revisited 

would  be  at  any  trouble  to  restrain  the  present  almost  un- 
bounded licence  in  the  matter  of  suffering — a  licence  that 
people  take  advantage  of  to  make  themselves  as  miserable  as 
they  please,  without  so  much  as  a  thought  for  the  feelings  of 
others.  Hence,  he  maintained,  the  practice  of  putting  dupes 
in  the  same  category  as  the  physically  diseased  or  the  unlucky 
was  founded  on  the  eternal  and  inherent  nature  of  things,  and 
could  no  more  be  interfered  with  than  the  revolution  of  the 
earth  on  its  axis. 

He  said  a  good  deal  more  to  the  same  effect,  and  I  was 
beginning  to  wonder  how  much  longer  he  would  think  it 
necessary  to  insist  on  what  was  so  obvious,  when  his  hearers 
began  to  differ  from  him.  One  dilated  on  the  correlation 
between  pain  and  pleasure  which  ensured  that  neither  could 
be  extinguished  without  the  extinguishing  along  with  it  of 
the  other.  Another  said  that  throughout  the  animal  and  vege- 
table worlds  there  was  found  what  might  be  counted  as  a  sys- 
tem of  rewards  and  punishments;  this,  he  contended,  must 
cease  to  exist  (and  hence  virtue  must  cease)  if  the  pain  at- 
taching to  misconduct  were  less  notoriously  advertised.  An- 
other maintained  that  the  horror  so  freely  expressed  by  many 
at  the  sight  of  pain  was  as  much  selfish  as  not — and  so  on. 

Let  Erewhon  be  revisited  by  the  son  of  the  original  writer — 
let  him  hint  that  his  father  used  to  write  the  advertisements 
for  Mother  Seigel's  Syrup.  He  gradually  worked  his  way  up 
to  this  from  being  a  mere  writer  of  penny  tracts.  [Dec.  1896.] 

On  reaching  the  country  he  finds  that  divine  honours  are 
being  paid  him,  churches  erected  to  him,  and  a  copious 
mythology  daily  swelling,  with  accounts  of  the  miracles  he 
had  worked  and  all  his  sayings  and  doings.  If  any  child  got 
hurt  he  used  to  kiss  the  place  and  it  would  get  well  at  once. 

Everything  has  been  turned  topsy-turvy  in  consequence  of 
his  flight  in  the  balloon  being  ascribed  to  miraculous  agency. 

Among  other  things,  he  had  maintained  that  sermons 
should  be  always  preached  by  two  people,  one  taking  one  side 
and  another  the  opposite,  while  a  third  summed  up  and  the 
congregation  decided  by  a  show  of  hands. 

This  system  had  been  adopted  and  he  goes  to  hear  a  sermon 
On  the  Growing  Habit  of  Careful  Patient  Investigation  as 
Encouraging  Casuistry.  [October  1897.] 


XIX 

Truth  and  Convenience 


Opposites 

You  may  have  all  growth  or  nothing  growth,  just  as  you  may 
have  all  mechanism  or  nothing  mechanism,  all  chance  or 
nothing  chance,  but  you  must  not  mix  them.  Having  settled 
this,  you  must  proceed  at  once  to  mix  them. 

Two  Points  of  View 

Everything  must  be  studied  from  the  point  of  view  of  itself, 
as  near  as  we  can  get  to  this,  and  from  the  point  of  view  of  its 
relations,  as  near  as  we  can  get  to  them.  If  we  try  to  see  it 
absolutely  in  itself,  unalloyed  with  relations,  we  shall  find,  by 
and  by,  that  we  have,  as  it  were,  whittled  it  away.  If  we  try 
to  see  it  in  its  relations  to  the  bitter  end,  we  shall  find  that 
there  is  no  corner  of  the  universe  into  which  it  does  not  enter. 
Either  way  the  thing  eludes  us  if  we  try  to  grasp  it  with  the 
horny  hands  of  language  and  conscious  thought.  Either  way 
we  can  think  it  perfectly  well — so  long  as  we  don't  think  about 
thinking  about  it.  The  pale  cast  of  thought  sicklies  over 
everything. 

Practically  everything  should  be  seen  as  itself  pure  and 
and  simple,  so  far  as  we  can  comfortably  see  it,  and  at  the 
same  time  as  not  itself,  so  far  as  we  can  comfortably  see  it, 
and  then  the  two  views  should  be  combined,  so  far  as  we  can 
comfortably  combine  them.  If  we  cannot  comfortably  com- 
bine them,  we  should  think  of  something  else. 

Truth 

i 

We  can  neither  define  what  we  mean  by  truth  nor  be  in 
doubt  as  to  our  meaning.  And  this  I  suppose  must  be  due  to 

297 


298  Truth  and  Convenience 

the  antiquity  of  the  instinct  that,  on  the  whole,  directs  us 
towards  truth.  We  cannot  self-vivisect  ourselves  in  respect 
of  such  a  vital  function,  though  we  can  discharge  it  normally 
and  easily  enough  so  long  as  we  do  not  think  about  it. 

ii 

The  pursuit  of  truth  is  chimerical.  That  is  why  it  is  so 
hard  to  say  what  truth  is.  There  is  no  permanent  absolute 
unchangeable  truth ;  what  we  should  pursue  is  the  most  con- 
venient arrangement  of  our  ideas. 

iii 

There  is  no  such  source  of  error  as  the  pursuit  of  absolute 
truth. 

iv 

A.  B.  was  so  impressed  with  the  greatness  and  certain 
ultimate  victory  of  truth  that  he  considered  it  unnecessary 
to  encourage  her  or  do  anything  to  defend  her. 


He  who  can  best  read  men  best  knows  all  truth  that  need 
concern  him ;  for  it  is  not  what  the  thing  is,  apart  from  man's 
thoughts  in  respect  of  it,  but  how  to  reach  the  fairest  compro- 
mise between  men's  past  and  future  opinions  that  is  the  fittest 
object  of  consideration ;  and  this  we  get  by  reading  men  and 
women. 

vi 

Truth  should  not  be  absolutely  lost  sight  of,  but  it  should 
not  be  talked  about. 

vii 

Some  men  love  truth  so  much  that  they  seem  to  be  in  con- 
tinual fear  lest  she  should  catch  cold  on  over-exposure. 

viii 

The  firmest  line  that  can  be  drawn  upon  the  smoothest 
paper  has  still  jagged  edges  if  seen  through  a  microscope. 
This  does  not  matter  until  important  deductions  are  made  on 
the  supposition  that  there  are  no  jagged  edges. 


Truth  and  Convenience  299 

ix 

Truth  should  never  be  allowed  to  become  extreme ;  other- 
wise it  will  be  apt  to  meet  and  to  run  into  the  extreme  of 
falsehood.  It  should  be  played  pretty  low  down — to  the  pit 
and  gallery  rather  than  the  stalls.  Pit-truth  is  more  true  to 
the  stalls  than  stall-truth  to  the  pit. 

x 

An  absolute  lie  may  live — for  it  is  a  true  lie,  and  is  saved  by 
being  flecked  with  a  grain  of  its  opposite.  Not  so  absolute 
truth. 

xi 

Whenever  we  push  truth  hard  she  runs  to  earth  in  contra- 
diction in  terms,  that  is  to  say,  in  falsehood.  An  essential 
contradiction  in  terms  meets  us  at  the  end  of  every  enquiry. 

xii 

In  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  (Chapter  V)  I  implied  that  I  was 
lying  when  I  told  the  novice  that  Handel  was  a  Catholic. 
But  I  was  not  lying ;  Handel  was  a  Catholic,  and  so  am  I,  and 
so  is  every  well-disposed  person.  It  shows  how  careful  we 
ought  to  be  when  we  lie — we  can  never  be  sure  but  what  we 
may  be  speaking  the  truth. 

xiii 

Perhaps  a  little  bit  of  absolute  truth  on  any  one  question 
might  prove  a  general  solvent,  and  dissipate  the  universe. 

xiv 

Truth  generally  is  kindness,  but  where  the  two  diverge  or 
collide,  kindness  should  override  truth. 

Falsehood 

i 

Truth  consists  not  in  never  lying  but  in  knowing  when  to 
lie  and  when  not  to  do  so.  De  minimis  non  curat  veritas. 

Yes,  but  what  is  a  minimum  ?  Sometimes  a  maximum  is  a 
minimum  and  sometimes  it  is  the  other  way. 

ii 

Lying  is  like  borrowing  or  appropriating  in  music.     It  is 


300  Truth  and  Convenience 

only  a  good,  sound,  truthful  person  who  can  lie  to  any  good 
purpose;  if  a  man  is  not  habitually  truthful  his  very  lies  will 
be  false  to  him  and  betray  him.  The  converse  also  is  true ;  if 
a  man  is  not  a  good,  sound,  honest,  capable  liar  there  is  no 
truth  in  him. 

iii 

Any  fool  can  tell  the  truth,  but  it  requires  a  man  of  some 
sense  to  know  how  to  lie  well. 

iv 
I  do  not  mind  lying,  but  I  hate  inaccuracy. 


A  friend  who  cannot  at  a  pinch  remember  a  thing  or  two 
that  never  happened  is  as  bad  as  one  who  does  not  know  how 
to  forget. 

vi 

Cursed  is  he  that  does  not  know  when  to  shut  his  mind. 
An  open  mind  is  all  very  well  in  its  way,  but  it  ought  not  to 
be  so  open  that  there  is  no  keeping  anything  in  or  out  of  it. 
It  should  be  capable  of  shutting  its  doors  sometimes,  or  it  may 
be  found  a  little  draughty. 

vii 

He  who  knows  not  how  to  wink  knows  not  how  to  see ;  and 
he  who  knows  not  how  to  lie  knows  not  how  to  speak  the 
truth.  So  he  who  cannot  suppress  his  opinions  cannot  express 
them. 

viii 

There  can  no  more  be  a  true  statement  without  falsehood 
distributed  through  it,  than  a  note  on  a  well-tuned  piano  that 
is  not  intentionally  and  deliberately  put  out  of  tune  to  some 
extent  in  order  to  have  the  piano  in  the  most  perfect  possible 
tune.  Any  perfection  of  tune  as  regards  one  key  can  only  be 
got  at  the  expense  of  all  the  rest. 

ix 

Lying  has  a  kind  of  respect  and  reverence  with  it.  We  pay 
a  person  the  compliment  of  acknowledging  his  superiority 
whenever  we  lie  to  him. 


Truth  and  Convenience  301 

X 

I  seem  to  see  lies  crowding  and  crushing  at  a  narrow  gate 
and  working  their  way  in  along  with  truths  into  the  domain 
of  history. 

Nature's  Double  Falsehood 

That  one  great  lie  she  told  about  the  earth  being  flat  when 
she  knew  it  was  round  all  the  time !  And  again  how  she  stuck 
to  it  that  the  sun  went  round  us  when  it  was  we  who  were 
going  round  the  sun !  This  double  falsehood  has  irretrievably 
ruined  my  confidence  in  her.  There  is  no  lie  which  she  will 
not  tell  and  stick  to  like  a  Gladstonian.  How  plausibly  she 
told  her  tale,  and  how  many  ages  was  it  before  she  was  so 
much  as  suspected !  And  then  when  things  did  begin  to  look 
bad  for  her,  how  she  brazened  it  out,  and  what  a  desperate 
business  it  was  to  bring  her  shifts  and  prevarications  to  book ! 

Convenience 

• 

We  wonder  at  its  being  as  hard  often  to  discover  con- 
venience as  it  is  to  discover  truth.  But  surely  convenience  is 
truth. 

ii 

The  use  of  truth  is  like  the  use  of  words;  both  truth  and 
words  depend  greatly  upon  custom. 

iii 

We  do  with  truth  much  as  we  do  with  God.  We  create  it 
according  to  our  own  requirements  and  then  say  that  it  has 
created  us,  or  requires  that  we  shall  do  or  think  so  and  so — 
whatever  we  find  convenient. 

iv 

"What  is  Truth  ?"  is  often  asked,  as  though  it  were  harder 
to  say  what  truth  is  than  what  anything  else  is.  But  what  is 
Justice?  What  is  anything?  An  eternal  contradiction  in 
terms  meets  us  at  the  end  of  every  enquiry.  We  are  not  re- 
quired to  know  what  truth  is,  but  to  speak  the  truth,  and  so 
with  justice. 


302  Truth  and  Convenience 


The  search  after  truth  is  like  the  search  after  perpetual 
motion  or  the  attempt  to  square  the  circle.  All  we  should  aim 
at  is  the  most  convenient  way  of  looking  at  a  thing — the  way 
that  most  sensible  people  are  likely  to  find  give  them  least 
trouble  for  some  time  to  come.  It  is  not  true  that  the  sun 
used  to  go  round  the  earth  until  Copernicus's  time,  but  it  is 
true  that  until  Copernicus's  time  it  was  most  convenient  to  us 
to  hold  this.  Still,  we  had  certain  ideas  which  could  only  fit 
in  comfortably  with  our  other  ideas  when  we  came  to  consider 
the  sun  as  the  centre  of  the  planetary  system. 

Obvious  convenience  often  takes  a  long  time  before  it  is 
fully  recognised  and  acted  upon,  but  there  will  be  a  nisus 
towards  it  as  long  and  as  widely  spread  as  the  desire  of  men 
to  be  saved  trouble.  If  truth  is  not  trouble-saving  in  the  long 
run  it  is  not  truth  :  truth  is  only  that  which  is  most  largely  and 
permanently  trouble-saving.  The  ultimate  triumph,  there- 
fore, of  truth  rests  on  a  very  tangible  basis — much  more  so 
than  when  it  is  made  to  depend  upon  the  will  of  an  unseen 
and  unknowable  agency.  If  my  views  about  the  Odyssey,  for 
example,  will,  in  the  long  run,  save  students  from  perplexity, 
the  students  will  be  sure  to  adopt  them,  and  I  have  no  wish 
that  they  should  adopt  them  otherwise. 

It  does  not  matter  much  what  the  truth  is,  but  our  knowing 
the  truth — that  is  to  say  our  hitting  on  the  most  permanently 
convenient  arrangement  of  our  ideas  upon  a  subject  whatever 
it  may  be — matters  very  much ;  at  least  it  matters,  or  may 
matter,  very  much  in  some  relations.  And  however  little  it 
matters,  yet  it  matters,  and  however  much  it  matters  yet  it 
does  not  matter.  In  the  utmost  importance  there  is  unim- 
portance, and  in  the  utmost  importance  there  is  im- 
portance. So  also  it  is  with  certainty,  life,  matter,  necessity, 
consciousness  and,  indeed,  with  everything  which  can  form 
an  object  of  human  sensation  at  all,  or  of  those  after- reason- 
ings which  spring  ultimately  from  sensations.  This  is  a 
round-about  way  of  saying  that  every  question  has  two  sides. 

vi 

Our  concern  is  with  the  views  we  shall  choose  to  take  and 
to  let  other  people  take  concerning  things,  and  as  to  the  way 
of  expressing  those  views  which  shall  give  least  trouble.  If 


Truth  and  Convenience  3°3 

we  express  ourselves  in  one  way  we  find  our  ideas  in  confu- 
sion and  our  action  impotent :  if  in  another  our  ideas  cohere 
harmoniously,  and  our  action  is  edifying.  The  convenience  of 
least  disturbing  vested  ideas,  and  at  the  same  time  rearranging 
our  views  in  accordance  with  new  facts  that  come  to  our 
knowledge,  this  is  our  proper  care.  But  it  is  idle  to  say  we  do 
not  know  anything  about  things — perhaps  we  do,  perhaps  we 
don't — but  we  at  any  rate  know  what  sane  people  think  and 
are  likely  to  think  about  things,  and  this  to  all  intents  and 
purposes  is  knowing  the  things  themselves.  For  the  things 
only  are  what  sensible  people  agree  to  say  and  think  they  are. 

vii 

The  arrangement  of  our  ideas  is  as  much  a  matter  of  con- 
venience as  the  packing  of  goods  in  a  druggist's  or  draper's 
store  and  leads  to  exactly  the  same  kind  of  difficulties  in  the 
matter  of  classifying  them.  We  all  admit  the  arbitrariness  of 
classifications  in  a  languid  way,  but  we  do  not  think  of  it  more 
than  we  can  help — I  suppose  because  it  is  so  inconvenient  to 
do  so.  The  great  advantage  of  classification  is  to  conceal  the 
fact  that  subdivisions  are  as  arbitrary  as  they  are. 

Classification 

There  can  be  no  perfect  way,  for  classification  presupposes 
that  a  thing  has  absolute  limits  whereas  there  is  nothing  that 
does  not  partake  of  the  universal  infinity — nothing  whose 
boundaries  do  not  vary.  Everything  is  one  thing  at  one  time 
and  in  some  respects,  and  another  at  other  times  and  in  other 
respects.  We  want  a  new  mode  of  measurement  altogether ; 
at  present  we  take  what  gaps  we  can  find,  set  up  milestones, 
and  declare  them  irremovable.  We  want  a  measure  which 
shall  express,  or  at  any  rate  recognise,  the  harmonics  of  re- 
semblance that  lurk  even  in  the  most  absolute  differences  and 
vice  versa. 

Attempts  at  Classification 

are  like  nailing  battens  of  our  own  flesh  and  blood  upon  our- 
selves as  an  inclined  plane  that  we  may  walk  up  ourselves 
more  easily ;  and  yet  it  answers  very  sufficiently. 


304  Truth  and  Convenience 

A  Clergyman's  Doubts 

Under  this  heading  a  correspondence  appeared  in  the  Ex- 
aminer, i$th  February  to  i^th  June,  1879.  Butler  wrote  all  the 
letters  under  various  signatures  except  one  or  perhaps  two.  His 
first  letter  purported  to  come  from  "An  Earnest  Clergyman" 
aged  forty-five,  with  a  wife,  five  children,  a  country  living 
worth  £400  a  year,  and  a  house,  but  no  private  means.  He  had 
ceased  to  believe  in  the  doctrines  he  was  called  upon  to  teach. 
Ought  he  to  continue  to  lead  a  life  that  was  a  lie  or  ought  he  to 
throw  up  his  orders  and  plunge  himself,  his  wife  and  children 
into  poverty?  The  dilemma  interested  Butler  deeply:  he  might 
so  easily  have  found  himself  in  it  if  he  had  not  begun  to  doubt 
the  efficacy  of  infant  baptism  when  he  did.  Fifteen  letters  fol- 
lowed,signed  "Cantab,"  "Oxonien  sis"  and  so  forth,  somereco  m- 
mending  one  course,  some  another.  One,  signed  "X.Y.Z.,"  in- 
cluded "The  Righteous  Man"  which  will  be  found  in  the  last 
group  of  this  volume,  headed  "Poems."  From  the  following 
letter  signed  "Ethics"  Butler  afterwards  took  two  passages 
(which  I  have  enclosed,  one  between  single  asterisks  the  other 
between  double  asterisks) , and  used  them  for  the  "Dissertation 
on  Lying"  which  is  in  Chapter  V  of  Alps  and  Sanctuaries. 

To  the  Editor  of  the  Examiner. 

Sir:  I  am  sorry  for  your  correspondent  "An  Earnest 
Clergyman"  for,  though  he  may  say  he  has  "come  to  smile  at 
his  troubles,"  his  smile  seems  to  be  a  grim  one.  We  must  all 
of  us  eat  a  peck  of  moral  dirt  before  we  die,  but  some  must 
know  more  precisely  than  others  when  they  are  eating  it ; 
some,  again,  can  bolt  it  without  wry  faces  in  one  shape,  while 
they  cannot  endure  even  the  smell  of  it  in  another.  "An 
Earnest  Clergyman"  admits  that  he  is  in  the  habit  of  telling 
people  certain  things  which  he  does  not  believe,  but  says  he 
has  no  great  fancy  for  deceiving  himself.  "Cantab"  must,  I 
fear,  deceive  himself  before  he  can  tolerate  the  notion  of  de- 
ceiving other  people.  For  my  own  part  I  prefer  to  be  deceived 
by  one  who  does  not  deceive  himself  rather  than  by  one  who 
does,  for  the  first  will  know  better  when  to  stop,  and  will  not 
commonly  deceive  me  more  than  he  can  help.  As  for  the 
other — if  he  does  not  know  how  to  invest  his  own  thoughts 
safely  he  will  invest  mine  still  worse ;  he  will  hold  God's  most 


Truth  and  Convenience  3°5 

precious  gift  of  falsehood  too  cheap;  he  has  come  by  it  too 
easily;  cheaply  come,  cheaply  go  will  be  his  maxim.  The 
good  liar  should  be  the  converse  of  the  poet;  he  should  be 
made,  not  born. 

It  is  not  loss  of  confidence  in  a  man's  strict  adherence  to  the 
letter  of  truth  that  shakes  my  confidence  in  him.  I  know  what 
I  do  myself  and  what  I  must  lose  all  social  elasticity  if  I  were 
not  to  do.  *Turning  for  moral  guidance  to  my  cousins  the 
lower  animals — whose  unsophisticated  instinct  proclaims 
what  God  has  taught  them  with  a  directness  we  may  some- 
times study — I  find  the  plover  lying  when  she  reads  us  truly 
and,  knowing  that  we  shall  hit  her  if  we  think  her  to  be  down, 
lures  us  from  her  young  ones  under  the  fiction  of  a  broken 
wing.  Is  God  angry,  think  you,  with  this  pretty  deviation 
from  the  letter  of  strict  accuracy?  or  was  it  not  He  who 
whispered  to  her  to  tell  the  falsehood,  to  tell  it  with  a  circum- 
stance, without  conscientious  scruples,  and  not  once  only  but 
to  make  a  practice  of  it,  so  as  to  be  an  habitual  liar  for  at  least 
six  weeks  in  the  year?  I  imagine  so.  When  I  was  young  I 
used  to  read  in  good  books  that  it  was  God  who  taught  the 
bird  to  make  her  nest,  and,  if  so,  He  probably  taught  each 
species  the  other  domestic  arrangements  which  should  be  best 
suited  to  it.  Or  did  the  nest-building  information  come  from 
God  and  was  there  an  Evil  One  among  the  birds  also  who 
taught  them  to  steer  clear  of  pedantry?  Then  there  is  the 
spider — an  ugly  creature,  but  I  suppose  God  likes  it — can  any- 
thing be  meaner  than  that  web  which  naturalists  extol  as  such 
a  marvel  of  Providential  ingenuity? 

Ingenuity!  The  word  reeks  with  lying.  Once,  on  a  sum- 
mer afternoon,  in  a  distant  country  I  met  one  of  those  orchids 
whose  main  idea  consists  in  the  imitation  of  a  fly;  this  lie 
they  dispose  so  plausibly  upon  their  petals  that  other  flies 
who  would  steal  their  honey  leave  them  unmolested.  Watch- 
ing intently  and  keeping  very  still,  methought  I  heard  this 
person  speaking  to  the  offspring  which  she  felt  within  her 
though  I  saw  them  not. 

"My  children,"  she  exclaimed,  "I  must  soon  leave  you; 
think  upon  the  fly,  my  loved  ones ;  make  it  look  as  terrible  as 
possible;  cling  to  this  thought  in  your  passage  through  life, 
for  it  is  the  one  thing  needful ;  once  lose  sight  of  it  and  you 
are  lost." 


306  Truth  and  Convenience 

Over  and  over  again  she  sang  this  burden  in  a  small,  still 
voice,  and  so  I  left  her.  Then  straightway  I  came  upon  some 
butterflies  whose  profession  it  was  to  pretend  to  believe  in  all 
manner  of  vital  truths  which  in  their  inner  practice  they  re- 
jected; thus,  pretending  to  be  certain  other  and  hateful  but- 
terflies which  no  bird  will  eat  by  reason  of  their  abominable 
smell,  these  cunning  ones  conceal  their  own  sweetness,  live 
long  in  the  land  and  see  good  days.  Think  of  that,  O  Earnest 
Clergyman,  my  friend !  No.  Lying  is  like  Nature,  you  may 
expel  her  with  a  fork,  but  she  will  always  come  back  again. 
Lying  is  like  the  poor,  we  must  have  it  always  with  us.  The 
question  is,  How  much,  when,  where,  to  whom  and  under 
what  circumstances  is  lying  right?  For,  once  admit  that  a 
plover  may  pretend  to  have  a  broken  wing  and  yet  be  without 
sin  if  she  have  pretended  well  enough,  and  the  thin  edge  of  the 
wedge  has  been  introduced  so  that  there  is  no  more  saying 
that  we  must  never  lie.* 

It  is  not,  then,  the  discovery  that  a  man  has  the  power  to  lie 
that  shakes  my  confidence  in  him;  it  is  loss  of  confidence  in 
his  mendacity  that  I  find  it  impossible  to  get  over.  I  forgive 
him  for  telling  me  lies,  but  I  cannot  forgive  him  for  not  telling 
me  the  same  lies,  or  nearly  so,  about  the  same  things.  This 
shows  he  has  a  slipshod  memory,  which  is  unpardonable,  or 
else  that  he  tells  so  many  lies  that  he  finds  it  impossible  to  re- 
member all  of  them,  and  this  is  like  having  too  many  of  the 
poor  always  with  us.  The  plover  and  the  spider  have  each  of 
them  their  stock  of  half  a  dozen  lies  or  so  which  we  may  ex- 
pect them  to  tell  when  occasion  arises ;  they  are  plausible  and 
consistent,  but  we  know  where  to  have  them;  otherwise,  if 
they  were  liable,  like  self-deceivers,  to  spring  mines  upon  us 
in  unexpected  places,  man  would  soon  make  it  his  business  to 
reform  them — not  from  within,  but  from  without. 

And  now  it  is  time  I  came  to  the  drift  of  my  letter,  which  is 
that  if  "An  Earnest  Clergyman"  has  not  cheated  himself  into 
thinking  he  is  telling  the  truth,  he  will  do  no  great  harm  by 
stopping  where  he  is.  Do  not  let  him  make  too  much  fuss 
about  trifles.  The  solemnity  of  the  truths  which  he  professes 
to  uphold  is  very  doubtful;  there  is  a  tacit  consent  that  it 
exists  more  on  paper  than  in  reality.  If  he  is  a  man  of  any 
tact,  he  can  say  all  he  is  compelled  to  say  and  do  all  the 
Church  requires  of  him — like  a  gentleman,  with  neither  undue 


Truth  and  Convenience  307 

slovenliness  nor  undue  unction — yet  it  shall  be  perfectly  plain 
to  all  his  parishioners  who  are  worth  considering  that  he  is 
acting  as  a  mouthpiece  and  that  his  words  are  spoken  dramati- 
cally. As  for  the  unimaginative,  they  are  as  children;  they 
cannot  and  should  not  be  taken  into  account.  Men  must  live 
as  they  must  write  or  act — for  a  certain  average  standard 
which  each  must  guess  at  for  himself  as  best  he  can;  those 
who  are  above  this  standard  he  cannot  reach;  those,  again, 
who  are  below  it  must  be  so  at  their  own  risk. 

Pilate  did  well  when  he  would  not  stay  for  an  answer  to  his 
question,  What  is  truth?  for  there  is  no  such  thing  apart 
from  the  sayer  and  the  sayee.  **There  is  that  irony  in  nature 
which  brings  it  to  pass  that  if  the  sayer  be  a  man  with  any 
stuff  in  him,  provided  he  tells  no  lies  wittingly  to  himself  and 
is  never  unkindly,  he  may  lie  and  lie  and  lie  all  the  day  long, 
and  he  will  no  more  be  false  to  any  man  than  the  sun  will 
shine  by  night;  his  lies  will  become  truths  as  they  pass  into 
the  hearer's  soul.  But  if  a  man  deceives  himself  and  is  un- 
kind, the  truth  is  not  in  him,  it  turns  to  falsehood  while  yet  in 
his  mouth,  like  the  quails  in  the  wilderness  of  Sinai.  How 
this  is  so  or  why,  I  know  not,  but  that  the  Lord  hath  mercy 
on  whom  He  will  have  mercy  and  whom  He  willeth  He  hard- 
eneth,  and  that  the  bad  man  can  do  no  right  and  the  good  no 
wrong.** 

A  great  French  writer  has  said  that  the  mainspring  of  our 
existence  does  not  lie  in  those  veins  and  nerves  and  arteries 
which  have  been  described  with  so  much  care — these  are  but 
its  masks  and  mouthpieces  through  which  it  acts  but  behind 
which  it  is  for  ever  hidden ;  so  in  like  manner  the  faiths  and 
formulae  of  a  Church  may  be  as  its  bones  and  animal  mechan- 
ism, but  they  are  not  the  life  of  the  Church,  which  is  some- 
thing rather  that  cannot  be  holden  in  words,  and  one  should 
know  how  to  put  them  off,  yet  put  them  off  gracefully,  if  they 
wish  to  come  too  prominently  forward.  Do  not  let  "An  Ear- 
nest Clergyman"  take  things  too  much  au  serieux.  He  seems 
to  be  fairly  contented  where  he  is ;  let  him  take  the  word  of 
one  who  is  old  enough  to  be  his  father,  that  if  he  has  a  talent 
for  conscientious  scruples  he  will  find  plenty  of  scope  for 
them  in  other  professions  as  well  as  in  the  Church.  I,  for 
aught  he  knows,  may  be  a  doctor  and  I  might  tell  my  own 
story ;  or  I  may  be  a  barrister  and  have  found  it  my  duty  to 


308  Truth  and  Convenience 

win  a  case  which  I  thought  a  very  poor  one,  whereby  others, 
whose  circumstances  were  sufficiently  pitiable,  lost  their  all; 
yet  doctors  and  barristers  do  not  write  to  the  newspapers  to 
air  their  poor  consciences  in  broad  daylight.  Why  should  An 
Earnest  (I  hate  the  word)  Clergyman  do  so?  Let  me  give 
him  a  last  word  or  two  of  fatherly  advice. 

Men  may  settle  small  things  for  themselves — as  what  they 
will  have  for  dinner  or  where  they  will  spend  the  vacation — 
but  the  great  ones — such  as  the  choice  of  a  profession,  of  the 
part  of  England  they  will  live  in,  whether  they  will  marry  or 
no — they  had  better  leave  the  force  of  circumstances  to  settle 
for  them ;  if  they  prefer  the  phraseology,  as  I  do  myself,  let 
them  leave  these  matters  to  God.  When  He  has  arranged 
things  for  them,  do  not  let  them  be  in  too  great  a  hurry  to 
upset  His  arrangement  in  a  tiff.  If  they  do  not  like  their 
present  and  another  opening  suggests  itself  easily  and  natu- 
rally, let  them  take  that  as  a  sign  that  they  make  a  change; 
otherwise,  let  them  see  to  it  that  they  do  not  leave  the  frying- 
pan  for  the  fire.  A  man,  finding  himself  in  the  field  of  a  pro- 
fession, should  do  as  cows  do  when  they  are  put  into  a  field 
of  grass.  They  do  not  like  any  field;  they  like  the  open 
prairie  of  their  ancestors.  They  walk,  however,  all  round 
their  new  abode,  surveying  the  hedges  and  gates  with  much 
interest.  If  there  is  a  gap  in  any  hedge  they  will  commonly 
go  through  it  at  once,  otherwise  they  will  resign  themselves 
contentedly  enough  to  the  task  of  feeding. 

I  am,  Sir, 
One  who  thinks  he  knows  a  thing  or  two  about 

ETHICS. 


XX 

First  Principles 

The  Baselessness  of  Our  Ideas 

THAT  our  ideas  are  baseless,  or  rotten  at  the  roots,  is  what 
few  who  study  them  will  deny ;  but  they  are  rotten  in  the  same 
way  as  property  is  robbery,  and  property  is  robbery  in  the 
same  way  as  our  ideas  are  rotten  at  the  roots,  that  is  to  say  it 
is  a  robbery  and  it  is  not.  No  title  to  property,  no  idea  and 
no  living  form  (which  is  the  embodiment  of  idea)  is  inde- 
feasible if  search  be  made  far  enough.  Granted  that  our 
thoughts  are  baseless,  yet  they  are  so  in  the  same  way  as  the 
earth  itself  is  both  baseless  and  most  firmly  based,  or  again 
most  stable  and  yet  most  in  motion. 

Our  ideas,  or  rather,  I  should  say,  our  realities,  are  all  of 
them  like  our  Gods,  based  on  superstitious  foundations.  If 
man  is  a  microcosm  then  kosmos  is  a  megalanthrope  and  that 
is  how  we  come  to  anthropomorphise  the  deity.  In  the  eternal 
pendulum  swing  of  thought  we  make  God  in  our  own  image, 
and  then  make  him  make  us,  and  then  find  it  out  and  cry 
because  we  have  no  God  and  so  on,  over  and  over  again  as  a 
child  has  new  toys  given  to  it,  tires  of  them,  breaks  them  and 
is  disconsolate  till  it  gets  new  ones  which  it  will  again  tire  of 
and  break.  If  the  man  who  first  made  God  in  his  own  image 
had  been  a  good  model,  all  might  have  been  well ;  but  he  was 
impressed  with  an  undue  sense  of  his  own  importance  and,  as 
a  natural  consequence,  he  had  no  sense  of  humour.  Both 
these  imperfections  he  has  fully  and  faithfully  reproduced  in 
his  work  and  with  the  result  we  are  familiar.  All  our  most 
solid  and  tangible  realities  are  but  as  lies  that  we  have  told 
too  often  henceforth  to  question  them.  But  we  have  to  ques- 
tion them  sometimes.  It  is  not  the  sun  that  goes  round  the 
world  but  we  who  go  round  the  sun. 

If  any  one  is  for  examining  and  making  requisitions  on  title 

309 


310  First  Principles 

we  can  search  too,  and  can  require  the  title  of  the  state  as 
against  any  other  state,  or  against  the  world  at  large.  But 
suppose  we  succeed  in  this,  we  must  search  further  still  and 
show  by  what  title  mankind  has  ousted  the  lower  animals,  and 
by  what  title  we  eat  them,  or  they  themselves  eat  grass  or  one 
another. 

See  what  quicksands  we  fall  into  if  we  wade  out  too  far 
from  the  terra  firma  of  common  consent !  The  error  springs 
from  supposing  that  there  is  any  absolute  right  or  absolute 
truth,  and  also  from  supposing  that  truth  and  right  are  any 
the  less  real  for  being  not  absolute  but  relative.  In  the  com- 
plex of  human  affairs  we  should  aim  not  at  a  supposed  abso- 
lute standard  but  at  the  greatest  coming-together-ness  or 
convenience  of  all  our  ideas  and  practices ;  that  is  to  say,  at 
their  most  harmonious  working  with  one  another.  Hit  our- 
selves somewhere  we  are  bound  to  do :  no  idea  will  travel  far 
without  colliding  with  some  other  idea.  Thus,  if  we  pursue 
one  line  of  probable  convenience,  we  find  it  convenient  to  see 
all  things  as  ultimately  one :  that  is,  if  we  insist  rather  on  the 
points  of  agreement  between  things  than  on  those  of  disagree- 
ment. If  we  insist  on  the  opposite  view,  namely,  on  the  points 
of  disagreement,  we  find  ourselves  driven  to  the  conclusion 
that  each  atom  is  an  individual  entity,  and  that  the  unity  be- 
tween even  the  most  united  things  is  apparent  only.  If  we  did 
not  unduly  insist  upon — that  is  to  say,  emphasise  and  exag- 
gerate— the  part  which  concerns  us  for  the  time,  we  should 
never  get  to  understand  anything;  the  proper  way  is  to  ex- 
aggerate first  one  view  and  then  the  other,  and  then  let  the 
two  exaggerations  collide,  but  good-temperedly  and  according 
to  the  laws  of  civilised  mental  warfare.  So  we  see  first  all 
things  as  one,  then  all  things  as  many  and,  in  the  end,  a  multi- 
tude in  unity  and  a  unity  in  multitude.  Care  must  be  taken 
not  to  accept  ideas  which  though  very  agreeable  at  first  disa- 
gree with  us  afterwards,  and  keep  rising  on  our  mental  stom- 
achs, as  garlic  does  upon  our  bodily. 

Imagination 

i 

Imagination  depends  mainly  upon  memory,  but  there  is  a 
small  percentage  of  creation  of  something  out  of  nothing  with 


First  Principles  311 

it.    We  can  invent  a  trifle  more  than  can  be  got  at  by  mere 
combination  of  remembered  things. 

ii 

When  we  are  impressed  by  a  few  only,  or  perhaps  only  one 
of  a  number  of  ideas  which  are  bonded  pleasantly  together, 
there  is  hope ;  when  we  see  a  good  many  there  is  expectation ; 
when  we  have  had  so  many  presented  to  us  that  we  have  ex- 
pected confidently  and  the  remaining  ideas  have  not  turned 
up,  there  is  disappointment.  So  the  sailor  says  in  the  play : 

"Here  are  my  arms,  here  is  my  manly  bosom,  but  where's 
my  Mary  ?" 

iii 

What  tricks  imagination  plays !  Thus,  if  we  expect  a  per- 
son in  the  street  we  transform  a  dozen  impossible  people  into 
him  while  they  are  still  too  far  off  to  be  seen  distinctly ;  and 
when  we  expect  to  hear  a  footstep  on  the  stairs — as,  we  will 
say,  the  postman's — we  hear  footsteps  in  every  sound.  Im- 
agination will  make  us  see  a  billiard  ball  as  likely  to  travel 
farther  than  it  will  travel,  if  we  hope  that  it  will  do  so.  It 
will  make  us  think  we  feel  a  train  begin  to  move  as  soon  as 
the  guard  has  said  "All  right,"  though  the  train  has  not  yet 
begun  to  move;  if  another  train  alongside  begins  to  move  ex- 
actly at  this  juncture,  there  is  no  man  who  will  not  be  de- 
ceived. And  we  omit  as  much  as  we  insert.  We  often  do  not 
notice  that  a  man  has  grown  a  beard. 

iv 

I  read  once  of  a  man  who  was  cured  of  a  dangerous  illness 
by  eating  his  doctor's  prescription  which  he  understood  was 
the  medicine  itself.  So  William  Sefton  Moorhouse  [in  New 
Zealand]  imagined  he  was  being  converted  to  Christianity  by 
reading  Burton's  Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  which  he  had  got 
by  mistake  for  Butler's  Analogy,  on  the  recommendation  of  a 
friend.  But  it  puzzled  him  a  good  deal. 

v 

At  Ivy  Hatch,  while  we  were  getting  our  beer  in  the  inner 
parlour,  there  was  a  confused  melee  of  voices  in  the  bar,  amid 
which  I  distinguished  a  voice  saying: 

"Imagination  will  do  any  bloody  thing  almost." 

I  was  writing  Life  and  Habit  at  the  time  and  was  much 


312  First  Principles 

tempted  to  put  this  passage  in.  Nothing  truer  has  ever  been 
said  about  imagination.  Then  the  voice  was  heard  addressing 
the  barman  and  saying: 

"I  suppose  you  wouldn't  trust  me  with  a  quart  of  beer, 
would  you?" 

Inexperience 

Kant  says  that  all  our  knowledge  is  founded  on  experience. 
But  each  new  small  increment  of  knowledge  is  not  so  founded, 
and  our  whole  knowledge  is  made  up  of  the  accumulation  of 
these  small  new  increments  not  one  of  which  is  founded  upon 
experience.  Our  knowledge,  then,  is  founded  not  on  experience 
but  on  inexperience ;  for  where  there  is  no  novelty,  that  is  to 
say  no  inexperience,  there  is  no  increment  in  experience.  Our 
knowledge  is  really  founded  upon  something  which  we  do  not 
know,  but  it  is  converted  into  experience  by  memory. 

It  is  like  species — we  do  not  know  the  cause  of  the  varia- 
tions whose  accumulation  results  in  species  and  any  expla- 
nation which  leaves  this  out  of  sight  ignores  the  whole  diffi- 
culty. We  want  to  know  the  cause  of  the  effect  that  inex- 
perience produces  on  us. 

Ex  Nihilo  Nihil  Fit 

We  say  that  everything  has  a  beginning.  This  is  one  side  of 
the  matter.  There  is  another  according  to  which  everything  is 
without  a  beginning — beginnings,  and  endings  also,  being,  but 
as  it  were,  steps  cut  in  a  slope  of  ice  without  which  we  could 
not  climb  it.  They  are  for  convenience  and  the  hardness  of 
the  hearts  of  men  who  make  an  idol  of  classification,  but  they 
do  not  exist  apart  from  our  sense  of  our  own  convenience. 

It  was  a  favourite  saying  with  William  Sefton  Moorhouse 
[in  New  Zealand]  that  men  cannot  get  rich  by  swopping 
knives.  Nevertheless  nature  does  seem  to  go  upon  this  princi- 
ple. Everybody  does  eat  everybody  up.  Man  eats  birds,  birds 
eat  worms  and  worms  eat  man  again.  It  is  a  vicious  circle, 
yet,  somehow  or  other,  there  is  an  increment.  I  begin  to 
doubt  the  principle  ex  nihilo  nihil  fit. 

We  very  much  want  a  way  of  getting  something  out  of 
nothing  and  back  into  it  again.  Whether  or  no  we  ever  shall 
get  such  a  way,  we  see  the  clearly  perceptible  arising  out  of 
and  returning  into  the  absolutely  imperceptible  and,  so  far  as 


First  Principles  3J3 

we  are  concerned,  this  is  much  the  same  thing.  To  assume  an 
unknowable  substratum  as  the  source  from  which  all  things 
proceed  or  are  evolved  is  equivalent  to  assuming  that  they 
come  up  out  of  nothing ;  for  that  which  does  not  exist  for  us 
is  for  us  nothing;  that  which  we  do  not  know  does  not  exist 
qua  us,  and  therefore  it  does  not  exist.  When  I  say  "we,"  I 
mean  mankind  generally,  for  things  may  exist  qua  one  man 
and  not  qua  another.  And  when  I  say  "nothing"  I  postulate 
something  of  which  we  have  no  experience. 

And  yet  we  cannot  say  that  a  thing  does  not  exist  till  it  is 
known  to  exist.  The  planet  Neptune  existed  though,  qua  us, 
it  did  not  exist  before  Adams  and  Leverrier  discovered  it,  and 
we  cannot  hold  that  its  continued  non-existence  to  my  laun- 
dress and  her  husband  makes  it  any  the  less  an  entity.  We 
cannot  say  that  it  did  not  exist  at  all  till  it  was  discovered, 
that  it  exists  only  partially  and  vaguely  to  most  of  us,  that  to 
many  it  still  does  not  exist  at  all,  that  there  are  few  to  whom 
it  even  exists  in  any  force  or  fullness  and  none  who  can  realise 
more  than  the  broad  facts  of  its  existence.  Neptune  has  been 
disturbing  the  orbits  of  the  planets  nearest  to  him  for  more 
centuries  than  we  can  reckon,  and  whether  or  not  he  is  known 
to  have  been  doing  so  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  matter. 
If  A  is  robbed,  he  is  robbed,  whether  he  knows  it  or 
not. 

In  one  sense,  then,  we  cannot  say  that  the  planet  Neptune 
did  not  exist  till  he  was  discovered,  but  in  another  we  can  and 
ought  to  do  so.  De  non  apparentibus  et  non  existentibus 
eadem  est  ratio;  as  long,  therefore,  as  Neptune  did  not  appear 
he  did  not  exist  qua  us.  The  only  way  out  of  it  is  through 
the  contradiction  in  terms  of  maintaining  that  a  thing  exists 
and  does  not  exist  at  one  and  the  same  time.  So  A  may  be 
both  robbed,  and  not  robbed. 

We  consider,  therefore,  that  things  have  assumed  their 
present  shape  by  course  of  evolution  from  a  something  which, 
qua  us,  is  a  nothing,  from  a  potential  something  but  not  an 
actual,  from  an  actual  nothing  but  a  potential  not-nothing, 
from  a  nothing  which  might  become  a  something  to  us  with 
any  modification  on  our  parts  but  which,  till  such  modification 
has  arisen,  does  not  exist  in  relation  to  us,  though  very  con- 
ceivably doing  so  in  relation  to  other  entities.  But  this  Pro- 
tean nothing,  capable  of  appearing  as  something,  is  not  the 


3H  First  Principles 

absolute,  eternal,  unchangeable  nothing  that  we  mean  when 
we  say  ex  nihilo  nihil  fit. 

The  alternative  is  that  something  should  not  have  come  out 
of  nothing,  and  this  is  saying  that  something  has  always 
existed.  But  the  eternal  increateness  of  matter  seems  as 
troublesome  to  conceive  as .  its  having  been  created  out  of 
nothing.  I  say  "seems,"  for  I  am  not  sure  how  far  it  really  is 
so.  We  never  saw  something  come  out  of  nothing,  that  is  to 
say,  we  never  saw  a  beginning  of  anything  except  as  the  be- 
ginning of  a  new  phase  of  something  pre-existent.  We  ought 
therefore  to  find  the  notion  of  eternal  being  familiar,  it  ought 
to  be  the  only  conception  of  matter  which  we  are  able  to 
form :  nevertheless,  we  are  so  carried  away  by  being  accus- 
tomed to  see  phases  have  their  beginnings  and  endings  that  we 
forget  that  the  matter,  of  which  we  see  the  phase  begin  and 
end,  did  not  begin  or  end  with  the  phase. 

Eternal  matter  permeated  by  eternal  mind,  matter  and 
mind  being  functions  of  one  another,  is  the  least  uncomforta- 
ble way  of  looking  at  the  universe;  but  as  it  is  beyond  our 
comprehension,  and  cannot  therefore  be  comfortable,  sensible 
persons  will  not  look  at  the  universe  at  all  except  in  such 
details  as  may  concern  them. 

Contradiction  in  Terms 

We  pay  higher  and  higher  in  proportion  to  the  service  ren- 
dered till  we  get  to  the  highest  services,  such  as  becoming  a 
Member  of  Parliament,  and  this  must  not  be  paid  at  all.  If 
a  man  would  go  yet  higher  and  found  a  new  and  permanent 
system,  or  create  some  new  idea  or  work  of  art  which  remains 
to  give  delight  to  ages — he  must  not  only  not  be  paid,  but  he 
will  have  to  pay  very  heavily  out  of  his  own  pocket  into  the 
bargain. 

Again,  we  are  to  get  all  men  to  speak  well  of  us  if  we  can ; 
yet  we  are  to  be  cursed  if  all  men  speak  well  of  us. 

So  when  the  universe  has  gathered  itself  into  a  single  ball 
(which  I  don't  for  a  moment  believe  it  ever  will,  but  I  don't 
care)  it  will  no  sooner  have  done  so,  than  the  bubble  will 
burst  and  it  will  go  back  to  its  gases  again. 

Contradiction  in  terms  is  so  omnipresent  that  we  treat  it 
as  we  treat  death,  or  free-will,  or  fate,  or  air,  or  God,  or  the 


First  Principles  3*5 

Devil — taking  these  things  so  much  as  matters  of  course  that, 
though  they  are  visible  enough  if  we  choose  to  see  them,  we 
neglect  them  normally  altogether,  without  for  a  moment  in- 
tending to  deny  their  existence.  This  neglect  is  convenient 
as  preventing  repetitions  the  monotony  of  which  would  de- 
feat their  own  purpose,  but  people  are  tempted  nevertheless 
to  forget  the  underlying  omnipresence  in  the  superficial  omni- 
absence.  They  forget  that  its  opposite  lurks  in  everything — 
that  there  are  harmonics  of  God  in  the  Devil  and  harmonics 
of  the  Devil  in  God. 

Contradiction  in  terms  is  not  only  to  be  excused  but  there 
can  be  no  proposition  which  does  not  more  or  less  involve 
one. 

It  is  the  fact  of  there  being  contradictions  in  terms,  which 
have  to  be  smoothed  away  and  fused  into  harmonious  ac- 
quiescence with  their  surroundings,  that  makes  life  and  con- 
sciousness possible  at  all.  Unless  the  unexpected  were  sprung 
upon  us  continually  to  enliven  us  we  should  pass  life,  as  it 
were,  in  sleep.  To  a  living  being  no  "It  is"  can  be  absolute ; 
wherever  there  is  an  "Is,"  there,  among  its  harmonics,  lurks 
an  "Is  not."  When  there  is  absolute  absence  of  "Is  not"  the 
"Is"  goes  too.  And  the  "Is  not"  does  not  go  completely  till 
the  "Is"  is  gone  along  with  it.  Every  proposition  has  got  a 
skeleton  in  its  cupboard. 

Extremes 


Intuition  and  evidence  seem  to  have  something  of  the  same 
relation  that  faith  and  reason,  luck  and  cunning,  free-will 
and  necessity  and  demand  and  supply  have.  They  grow  up 
hand  in  hand  and  no  man  can  say  which  comes  first.  It  is 
the  same  with  life  and  death,  which  lurk  one  within  the  other 
as  do  rest  and  unrest,  change  and  persistence,  heat  and  cold, 
poverty  and  riches,  harmony  and  counterpoint,  night  and  day, 
summer  and  winter. 

And  so  with  pantheism  and  atheism;  loving  everybody  is 
loving  nobody,  and  God  everywhere  is,  practically,  God  no- 
where. I  once  asked  a  man  if  he  was  a  free-thinker;  he 
replied  that  he  did  not  think  he  was.  And  so,  I  have  heard 
of  a  man  exclaiming  "I  am  an  atheist,  thank  God !"  Those 


316  First  Principles 

who  say  there  is  a  God  are  wrong  unless  they  mean  at  the 
same  time  that  there  is  no  God,  and  vice  versa.  The 
difference  is  the  same  as  that  between  plus  nothing  and 
minus  nothing,  and  it  is  hard  to  say  which  we  ought  to  ad- 
mire and  thank  most — the  first  theist  or  the  first  atheist. 
Nevertheless,  for  many  reasons,  the  plus  nothing  is  to  be 
preferred. 

ii 

To  be  poor  is  to  be  contemptible,  to  be  very  poor  is  worse 
still,  and  so  on;  but  to  be  actually  at  the  point  of  death 
through  poverty  is  to  be  sublime.  So  "when  weakness  is 
utter,  honour  ceaseth."  [The  Righteous  Man,  p.  390,  post.] 

iii 

The  meeting  of  extremes  is  never  clearer  than  in  the  case 
of  moral  and  intellectual  strength  and  weakness.  We  may 
say  with  Hesiod  "How  much  the  half  is  greater  than  the 
whole !"  or  with  S.  Paul  "My  strength  is  made  perfect  in 
weakness" ;  they  come  to  much  the  same  thing.  We  all  know 
strength  so  strong  as  to  be  weaker  than  weakness  and  weak- 
ness so  great  as  to  be  stronger  than  strength. 

iv 

The  Queen  travels  as  the  Countess  of  Balmoral  and  would 
probably  be  very  glad,  if  she  could,  to  travel  as  plain  Mrs. 
Smith.  There  is  a  good  deal  of  the  Queen  lurking  in  every 
Mrs.  Smith  and,  conversely,  a  good  deal  of  Mrs.  Smith  lurk- 
ing in  every  queen. 

Free- Will  and  Necessity 

As  I  am  tidying  up,  and  the  following  beginning  of  a  paper 
on  the  above  subject  has  been  littering  about  my  table  since 
December  1889,  which  is  the  date  on  the  top  of  page  i,  I  will 
shoot  it  on  to  this  dust-heap  and  bury  it  out  of  my  sight.  It 
runs : 

The  difficulty  has  arisen  from  our  forgetting  that  contra- 
diction in  terms  lies  at  the  foundation  of  all  our  thoughts 
as  a  condition  and  sine  qua  non  of  our  being  able  to  think  at 
all.  We  imagine  that  we  must  either  have  all  free-will  and 
no  necessity,  or  all  necessity  and  no  free-will,  and,  it  being 


First  Principles  317 

obvious  that  our  free-will  is  often  overriden  by  force  of  cir- 
cumstances while  the  evidence  that  necessity  is  overridden 
by  free-will  is  harder  to  find  (if  indeed  it  can  be  found,  for 
I  have  not  fully  considered  the  matter),  most  people  who 
theorise  upon  this  question  will  deny  in  theory  that  there  is 
any  free-will  at  all,  though  in  practice  they  take  care  to  act 
as  if  there  was.  For  if  we  admit  that  like  causes  are  fol- 
lowed by  like  effects  (and  everything  that  we  do  is  based 
upon  this  hypothesis),  it  follows  that  every  combination  of 
causes  must  have  some  one  consequent  which  can  alone  follow 
it  and  which  free-will  cannot  touch. 

(Yes,  but  it  will  generally  be  found  that  free-will  entered 
into  the  original  combination  and  the  repetition  of  the  com- 
bination will  not  be  exact  unless  a  like  free-will  is  repeated 
along  with  all  the  other  factors.) 

From  which  it  follows  that  free-will  is  apparent  only,  and 
that,  as  I  said  years  ago  in  Erewhon,  we  are  not  free  to  choose 
what  seems  best  on  each  occasion  but  bound  to  do  so,  being 
fettered  to  the  freedom  of  our  wills  throughout  our  lives. 

But  to  deny  free-will  is  to  deny  moral  responsibility,  and 
we  are  landed  in  absurdity  at  once — for  there  is  nothing  more 
patent  than  that  moral  responsibility  exists.  Nevertheless, 
at  first  sight,  it  would  seem  as  though  we  ought  not  to  hang 
a  man  for  murder  if  there  was  no  escape  for  him  but  that  he 
must  commit  one.  Of  course  the  answer  to  one  who  makes 
this  objection  is  that  our  hanging  him  is  as  much  a  matter  of 
necessity  as  his  committing  the  murder. 

If,  again,  necessity,  as  involved  in  the  certainty  that  like 
combinations  will  be  followed  by  like  consequence,  is  a  basis 
on  which  all  our  actions  are  founded,  so  also  is  free-will. 
This  is  quite  as  much  a  sine  qua  non  for  action  as  necessity 
is ;  for  who  would  try  to  act  if  he  did  not  think  that  his  trying 
would  influence  the  result? 

We  have  therefore  two  apparently  incompatible  and 
mutually  destructive  faiths,  each  equally  and  self-evidently 
demonstrable,  each  equally  necessary  for  salvation  of  any 
kind,  and  each  equally  entering  into  every  thought  and 
action  of  our  whole  lives,  yet  utterly  contradictory  and 
irreconcilable. 

Can  any  dilemma  seem  more  hopeless?  It  is  not  a  case 
of  being  able  to  live  happily  with  either  were  t'other  dear 


First  Principles 

charmer  away;  it  is  indispensable  that  we  should  embrace 
both,  and  embrace  them  with  equal  cordiality  at  the  same 
time,  though  each  annihilates  the  other.  It  is  as  though  it 
were  indispensable  to  our  existence  to  be  equally  dead  and 
equally  alive  at  one  and  the  same  moment. 

Here  we  have  an  illustration  which  may  help  us.  For, 
after  all,  we  are  both  dead  and  alive  at  one  and  the  same 
moment.  There  is  no  life  without  a  taint  of  death  and  no 
death  that  is  not  instinct  with  a  residuum  of  past  life  and 
with  germs  of  the  new  that  is  to  succeed  it.  Let  those  who 
deny  this  show  us  an  example  of  pure  life  and  pure  death. 
Any  one  who  has  considered  these  matters  will  know  this  to 
be  impossible.  And  yet  in  spite  of  this,  the  cases  where  we 
are  in  doubt  whether  a  thing  is  to  be  more  fitly  called  dead 
or  alive  are  so  few  that  they  may  be  disregarded. 

I  take  it,  then,  that  as,  though  alive,  we  are  in  part  dead 
and,  though  dead,  in  part  alive,  so,  though  bound  by  necessity, 
we  are  in  part  free,  and,  though  free,  yet  in  part  bound  by 
necessity.  At  least  I  can  think  of  no  case  of  such  absolute 
necessity  in  human  affairs  as  that  free-will  should  have  no 
part  in  it,  nor  of  such  absolute  free-will  that  no  part  of  the 
action  should  be  limited  and  controlled  by  necessity. 

Thus,  when  a  man  walks  to  the  gallows,  he  is  under  large 
necessity,  yet  he  retains  much  small  freedom ;  when  pinioned, 
he  is  less  free,  but  he  can  open  his  eyes  and  mouth  and  pray 
aloud  or  no  as  he  pleases ;  even  when  the  drop  has  fallen,  so 
long  as  he  is  "he"  at  all,  he  can  exercise  some,  though  in- 
finitely small,  choice. 

It  may  be  answered  that  throughout  the  foregoing  chain 
of  actions,  the  freedom,  what  little  there  is  of  it,  is  apparent 
only,  and  that  even  in  the  small  freedoms,  which  are  not  so 
obviously  controlled  by  necessity,  the  necessity  is  still  present 
as  effectually  as  when  the  man,  though  apparently  free  to 
walk  to  the  gallows,  is  in  reality  bound  to  do  so.  For  in 
respect  of  the  small  details  of  his  manner  of  walking  to  the 
gallows,  which  compulsion  does  not  so  glaringly  reach,  what 
is  it  that  the  man  is  free  to  do  ?  He  is  free  to  do  as  he  likes, 
but  he  is  not  free  to  do  as  he  does  not  like ;  and  a  man's 
likings  are  determined  by  outside  things  and  by  antecedents, 
pre-natal  and  post-natal,  whose  effect  is  so  powerful  that  the 
individual  who  makes  the  choice  proves  to  be  only  the  re- 


First  Principles  3*9 

sultant  of  certain  forces  which  have  been  brought  to  bear 
upon  him  but  which  are  not  the  man.  So  that  it  seems  there 
is  no  detail,  no  nook  or  corner  of  action,  into  which  necessity 
does  not  penetrate. 

This  seems  logical,  but  it  is  as  logical  to  follow  instinct  and 
common  sense  as  to  follow  logic,  and  both  instinct  and  com- 
mon sense  assure  us  that  there  is  no  nook  or  corner  of  ac- 
tion into  which  free-will  does  not  penetrate,  unless  it  be 
those  into  which  mind  does  not  enter  at  all,  as  when  a 
man  is  struck  by  lightning  or  is  overwhelmed  suddenly  by  an 
avalanche. 

Besides,  those  who  maintain  that  action  is  bound  to  fol- 
low choice,  while  choice  can  only  follow  opinion  as  to  ad- 
vantage, neglect  the  very  considerable  number  of  cases  in 
which  opinion  as  to  advantage  does  not  exist — when,  for  in- 
stance, a  man  feels,  as  we  all  of  us  sometimes  do,  that  he 
is  utterly  incapable  of  forming  any  opinion  whatever  as  to 
his  most  advantageous  course. 

But  this  again  is  fallacious.  For  suppose  he  decides  to 
toss  up  and  be  guided  by  the  result,  this  is  still  what  he  has 
chosen  to  do,  and  his  action,  therefore,  is  following  his  choice. 
Or  suppose,  again,  that  he  remains  passive  and  does  nothing — 
his  passivity  is  his  choice. 

I  can  see  no  way  out  of  it  unless  either  frankly  to  admit 
that  contradiction  in  terms  is  the  bedrock  on  which  all  our 
thoughts  and  deeds  are  founded,  and  to  acquiesce  cheerfully 
in  the  fact  that  whenever  we  try  to  go  below  the  surface  of 
any  enquiry  we  find  ourselves  utterly  baffled — or  to  redefine 
freedom  and  necessity,  admitting  each  as  a  potent  factor  of 
the  other.  And  this  I  do  not  see  my  way  to  doing.  I  am 
therefore  necessitated  to  choose  freely  the  admission  that 
our  understanding  can  burrow  but  a  very  small  way  into  the 
foundations  of  our  beliefs,  and  can  only  weaken  rather  than 
strengthen  them  by  burrowing  at  all. 

Free-Will  otherwise  Cunning 

The  element  of  free-will,  cunning,  spontaneity,  individu- 
ality— so  omnipresent,  so  essential,  yet  so  unreasonable, 
and  so  inconsistent  with  the  other  element  not  less  omni- 
present and  not  less  essential,  I  mean  necessity,  luck,  fate — 


320  First  Principles 

this  element  of  free-will,  which  comes  from  the  unseen  king- 
dom within  which  the  writs  of  our  thoughts  run  not,  must  be 
carried  down  to  the  most  tenuous  atoms  whose  action  is 
supposed  most  purely  chemical  and  mechanical ;  it  can  never 
be  held  as  absolutely  eliminated,  for  if  it  be  so  held,  there 
is  no  getting  it  back  again,  and  that  it  exists,  even  in  the 
lowest  forms  of  life,  cannot  be  disputed.  Its  existence  is 
one  of  the  proofs  of  the  existence  of  an  unseen  world,  and  a 
means  whereby  we  know  the  little  that  we  do  know  of  that 
world. 

Necessity  otherwise  Luck 

It  is  all  very  well  to  insist  upon  the  free-will  or  cunning 
side  of  living  action,  more  especially  now  when  it  has  been 
so  persistently  ignored,  but  though  the  fortunes  of  birth  and 
surroundings  have  all  been  built  up  by  cunning,  yet  it  is  by 
ancestral,  vicarious  cunning,  and  this,  to  each  individual, 
comes  to  much  the  same  as  luck  pure  and  simple;  in  fact, 
luck  is  seldom  seriously  intended  to  mean  a  total  denial  of 
cunning,  but  is  for  the  most  part  only  an  expression  whereby 
we  summarise  and  express  our  sense  of  a  cunning  too  complex 
and  impalpable  for  conscious  following  and  apprehension. 

When  we  consider  how  little  we  have  to  do  with  our  parent- 
age, country  and  education,  or  even  with  our  genus  and 
species,  how  vitally  these  things  affect  us  both  in  life  and 
death,  and  how,  practically,  the  cunning  in  connection  with 
them  is  so  spent  as  to  be  no  cunning  at  all,  it  is  plain  that  the 
drifts,  currents,  and  storms  of  what  is  virtually  luck  will  be 
often  more  than  the  little  helm  of  cunning  can  control.  And 
so  with  death.  Nothing  can  affect  us  less,  but  at  the  same 
time  nothing  can  affect  us  more ;  and  how  little  can  cunning 
do  against  it?  At  the  best  it  can  only  defer  it.  Cunning  is 
nine-tenths  luck,  and  luck  is  nine-tenths  cunning ;  but  the  fact 
that  nine-tenths  of  cunning  is  luck  leaves  still  a  tenth  part 
unaccounted  for. 

Choice 

Our  choice  is  apparently  most  free,  and  we  are  least  ob- 
viously driven  to  determine  our  course,  in  those  cases  where 
the  future  is  most  obscure,  that  is,  when  the  balance  of  ad- 
vantage appears  most  doubtful. 


First  Principles  321 

Where  we  have  an  opinion  that  assures  us  promptly  which 
way  the  balance  of  advantage  will  incline — whether  it  be  an 
instinctive,  hereditarily  acquired  opinion  or  one  rapidly  and 
decisively  formed  as  the  result  of  post-natal  experience — then 
our  action  is  determined  at  once  by  that  opinion,  and  freedom 
of  choice  practically  vanishes. 

Ego  and  N  on- Ego 

You  can  have  all  ego,  or  all  non-ego,  but  in  theory  you 
cannot  have  half  one  and  half  the  other — yet  in  practice  this 
is  exactly  what  you  must  have,  for  everything  is  both  itself 
and  not  itself  at  one  and  the  same  time. 

A  living  thing  is  itself  in  so  far  as  it  has  wants  and  gratifies 
them.  It  is  not  itself  in  so  far  as  it  uses  itself  as  a  tool  for 
the  gratifying  of  its  wants.  Thus  an  amceba  is  aware  of  a 
piece  of  meat  which  it  wants  to  eat.  It  has  nothing  except 
its  own  body  to  fling  at  the  meat  and  catch  it  with.  If  it  had 
a  little  hand-net,  or  even  such  an  organ  as  our  own  hand,  it 
would  use  it,  but  it  has  only  got  itself;  so  it  takes  itself  by 
the  scruff  of  its  own  neck,  as  it  were,  and  flings  itself  at  the 
piece  of  meat,  as  though  it  were  not  itself  but  something 
which  it  is  using  in  order  to  gratify  itself.  So  we  make  our 
own  bodies  into  carriages  every  time  we  walk.  Our  body  is 
our  tool-box — and  our  bodily  organs  are  the  simplest  tools 
we  can  catch  hold  of. 

When  the  amoeba  has  got  the  piece  of  meat  and  has  done 
digesting  it,  it  leaves  off  being  not  itself  and  becomes  itself 
again.  A  thing  is  only  itself  when  it  is  doing  nothing;  as 
long  as  it  is  doing  something  it  is  its  own  tool  and  not  itself. 

Or  you  may  have  it  that  everything  is  itself  in  respect  of 
the  pleasure  or  pain  it  is  feeling,  but  not  itself  in  respect  of 
the  using  of  itself  by  itself  as  a  tool  with  which  to  work  its 
will.  Or  perhaps  we  should  say  that  the  ego  remains  always 
ego  in  part;  it  does  not  become  all  non-ego  at  one  and  the 
same  time.  We  throw  our  fist  into  a  man's  face  as  though 
it  were  a  stick  we  had  picked  up  to  beat  him  with.  For  the 
moment,  our  fist  is  hardly  "us,"  but  it  becomes  "us"  again 
as  we  feel  the  resistance  it  encounters  from  the  man's  eye. 
Anyway,  we  can  only  chuck  about  a  part  of  ourselves  at  a 
time,  we  cannot  chuck  the  lot — and  yet  I  do  not  know  this, 


322  First  Principles 

for  we  may  jump  off  the  ground  and  fling  ourselves  on  to  a 
man. 

The  fact  that  both  elements  are  present  and  are  of  such 
nearly  equal  value  explains  the  obstinacy  of  the  conflict  be- 
tween the  upholders  of  Necessity  and  Free- Will  which,  in- 
deed, are  only  luck  and  cunning  under  other  names. 

For,  on  the  one  hand,  the  surroundings  so  obviously  and 
powerfully  mould  us,  body  and  soul,  and  even  the  little  modi- 
fying power  which  at  first  we  seem  to  have  is  found,  on 
examination,  to  spring  so  completely  from  surroundings 
formerly  beyond  the  control  of  our  ancestors,  that  a  logical 
thinker,  who  starts  with  these  premises,  is  soon  driven  to  the 
total  denial  of  free-will,  except,  of  course,  as  an  illusion;  in 
other  words,  he  perceives  the  connection  between  ego  and 
non-ego,  tries  to  disunite  them  so  as  to  know  when  he  is 
talking  about  what,  and  finds  to  his  surprise  that  he  cannot 
do  so  without  violence  to  one  or  both.  Being,  above  all  things, 
a  logical  thinker,  and  abhorring  the  contradiction  in  terms 
involved  in  admitting  anything  to  be  both  itself  and  some- 
thing other  than  itself  at  one  and  the  same  time,  he  makes 
the  manner  in  which  the  one  is  rooted  into  the  other  a  pre- 
text for  merging  the  ego,  as  the  less  bulky  of  the  two,  in 
the  non-ego;  hence  practically  he  declares  the  ego  to  have 
no  further  existence,  except  as  a  mere  appendage  and  adjunct 
of  the  non-ego  the  existence  of  which  he  alone  recognises 
(though  how  he  can  recognise  it  without  recognising  also  that 
he  is  recognising  it  as  something  foreign  to  himself  it  is  not 
easy  to  see).  As  for  the  action  and  interaction  that  goes  on 
in  the  non-ego,  he  refers  it  to  fate,  fortune,  chance,  luck, 
necessity,  immutable  law,  providence  (meaning  generally  im- 
providence) or  to  whatever  kindred  term  he  has  most  fancy 
for.  In  other  words,  he  is  so  much  impressed  with  the  con- 
nection between  luck  and  cunning,  and  so  anxious  to  avoid 
contradiction  in  terms,  that  he  tries  to  abolish  cunning,  and 
dwells,  as  Mr.  Darwin  did,  almost  exclusively  upon  the  luck 
side  of  the  matter. 

Others,  on  the  other  hand,  find  the  ego  no  less  striking 
than  their  opponents  find  the  non-ego.  Every  hour  they 
mould  things  so  considerably  to  their  pleasure  that,  even 
though  they  may  for  argument's  sake  admit  free-will  to  be 
an  illusion,  they  say  with  reason  that  no  reality  can  be  more 


First  Principles  323 

real  than  an  illusion  which  is  so  strong,  so  persistent  and 
so  universal;  this  contention,  indeed,  cannot  be  disputed  ex- 
cept at  the  cost  of  invalidating  the  reality  of  all  even  our 
most  assured  convictions.  They  admit  that  there  is  an  ap- 
parent connection  between  their  ego  and  non-ego,  their 
necessity  and  free-will,  their  luck  and  cunning;  they  grant 
that  the  difference  is  resolvable  into  a  difference  of  degree 
and  not  of  kind ;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  they  say  that  in 
each  degree  there  still  lurks  a  little  kind,  and  that  a  differ- 
ence of  many  degrees  makes  a  difference  of  kind — there 
being,  in  fact,  no  difference  between  differences  of  degree  and 
those  of  kind,  except  that  the  second  are  an  accumulation  of 
the  first.  The  all-powerfulness  of  the  surroundings  is  declared 
by  them  to  be  as  completely  an  illusion,  if  examined  closely, 
as  the  power  of  the  individual  was  declared  to  be  by  their 
opponents,  inasmuch  as  the  antecedents  of  the  non-ego,  when 
examined  by  them,  prove  to  be  not  less  due  to  the  personal 
individual  element  everywhere  recognisable,  than  the  ego, 
when  examined  by  their  opponents,  proved  to  be  mergeable 
in  the  universal.  They  claim,  therefore,  to  be  able  to  resolve 
everything  into  spontaneity  and  free-will  with  no  less  logical 
consistency  than  that  with  which  free-will  can  be  resolved 
into  an  outcome  of  necessity. 

Two  Incomprehensibles 

You  may  assume  life  of  some  kind  omnipresent  for  ever 
throughout  matter.  This  is  one  way.  Another  way  is  to 
assume  an  act  of  spontaneous  generation,  i.e.  a  transition 
somewhere  and  somewhen  from  absolutely  non-living  to  abso- 
lutely living.  You  cannot  have  it  both  ways.  But  it  seems 
to  me  that  you  must  have  it  both  ways.  You  must  not  be- 
gin with  life  (or  potential  life)  everywhere  alone,  nor  must 
you  begin  with  a  single  spontaneous  generation  alone,  but 
you  must  carry  your  spontaneous  generation  (or  denial  of  the 
continuity  of  life)  down,  ad  infinitum,  just  as  you  must  carry 
your  continuity  of  life  (or  denial  of  spontaneous  generation) 
down  ad  infinitum  and,  compatible  or  incompatible,  you  must 
write  a  scientific  Athanasian  Creed  to  comprehend  these  two 
incomprehensibles. 

If,  then,  it  is  only  an  escape  from  one  incomprehensible 


324  First  Principles 

position  to  another,  cui  bono  to  make  a  change?  Why  not 
stay  quietly  in  the  Athanasian  Creed  as  we  are?  And,  after 
all,  the  Athanasian  Creed  is  light  and  comprehensible  read- 
ing in  comparison  with  much  that  now  passes  for  science. 

I  can  give  no  answer  to  this  as  regards  the  unintelligible 
clauses,  for  what  we  come  to  in  the  end  is  just  as  abhorrent 
to  and  inconceivable  by  reason  as  what  they  offer  us;  but 
as  regards  what  may  be  called  the  intelligible  parts — that 
Christ  was  born  of  a  Virgin,  died,  rose  from  the  dead — we 
say  that,  if  it  were  not  for  the  prestige  that  belief  in  these 
alleged  facts  has  obtained,  we  should  refuse  attention  to 
them.  Out  of  respect,  however,  for  the  mass  of  opinion  that 
accepts  them  we  have  looked  into  the  matter  with  care,  and 
we  have  found  the  evidence  break  down.  The  same  reasoning 
and  canons  of  criticism  which  convince  me  that  Christ  was 
crucified  convince  me  at  the  same  time  that  he  was  insuffi- 
ciently crucified.  I  can  only  accept  his  death  and  resurrection 
at  the  cost  of  rejecting  everything  that  I  have  been  taught 
to  hold  most  strongly.  I  can  only  accept  the  so-called  tes- 
timony in  support  of  these  alleged  facts  at  the  cost  of  re- 
jecting, or  at  any  rate  invalidating,  all  the  testimony  on  which 
I  have  based  all  comfortable  assurance  of  any  kind  what- 
soever. 

God  and  the  Unknown 

God  is  the  unknown,  and  hence  the  nothing  qua  us.  He 
is  also  the  ensemble  of  all  we  know,  and  hence  the  everything 
qua  us.  So  that  the  most  absolute  nothing  and  the  most 
absolute  everything  are  extremes  that  meet  (like  all  other 
extremes)  in  God. 

Men  think  they  mean  by  God  something  like  what  Raffaelle 
and  Michael  Angelo  have  painted;  unless  this  were  so  Raf- 
faelle and  Michael  Angelo  would  not  have  painted  as  they 
did.  But  to  get  at  our  truer  thoughts  we  should  look  at  our 
less  conscious  and  deliberate  utterances.  From  these  it  has 
been  gathered  that  God  is  our  expression  for  all  forces  and 
powers  which  we  do  not  understand,  or  with  which  we  are 
unfamiliar,  and  for  the  highest  ideal  of  wisdom,  goodness  and 
power  which  we  can  conceive,  but  for  nothing  else. 

Thus  God  makes  the  grass  grow  because  we  do  not  under- 
stand how  the  air  and  earth  and  water  near  a  piece  of  grass 


First  Principles  325 

are  seized  by  the  grass  and  converted  into  more  grass;  but 
God  does  not  mow  the  grass  and  make  hay  of  it.  It  is  Paul 
and  Apollos  who  plant  and  water,  but  God  who  giveth  the 
increase.  We  never  say  that  God  does  anything  which  we 
can  do  ourselves,  or  ask  him  for  anything  which  we  know 
how  to  get  in  any  other  way.  As  soon  as  we  understand  a 
thing  we  remove  it  from  the  sphere  of  God's  action. 

As  long  as  there  is  an  unknown  there  will  be  a  God  for  all 
practical  purposes ;  the  name  of  God  has  never  yet  been  given 
to  a  known  thing  except  by  way  of  flattery,  as  to  Roman 
Emperors,  or  through  the  attempt  to  symbolise  the  unknown 
generally,  as  in  fetish  worship,  and  then  the  priests  had  to  tell 
the  people  that  there  was  something  more  about  the  fetish 
than  they  knew  of,  or  they  would  soon  have  ceased  to  think 
of  it  as  God. 

To  understand  a  thing  is  to  feel  as  though  we  could  stand 
under  or  alongside  of  it  in  all  its  parts  and  form  a  picture  of 
it  in  our  minds  throughout.  We  understand  how  a  violin  is 
made  if  our  minds  can  follow  the  manufacture  in  all  its 
detail  and  picture  it  to  ourselves.  If  we  feel  that  we  can 
identify  ourselves  with  the  steam  and  machinery  of  a  steam 
engine,  so  as  to  travel  in  imagination  with  the  steam  through 
all  the  pipes  and  valves,  if  we  can  see  the  movement  of  each 
part  of  the  piston,  connecting  rod,  &c.,  so  as  to  be  mentally 
one  with  both  the  steam  and  the  mechanism  throughout  their 
whole  action  and  construction,  then  we  say  we  understand 
the  steam  engine,  and  the  idea  of  God  never  crosses  our  minds 
in  connection  with  it. 

When  we  feel  that  we  can  neither  do  a  thing  ourselves, 
nor  even  learn  to  do  it  by  reason  of  its  intricacy  and  diffi- 
culty, and  that  no  one  else  ever  can  or  will,  and  yet  we  see 
the  thing  none  the  less  done  daily  and  hourly  all  round  us, 
then  we  are  not  content  to  say  we  do  not  understand  how 
the  thing  is  done,  we  go  further  and  ascribe  the  action  to  God. 
As  soon  as  there  is  felt  to  be  an  unknown  and  apparently 
unknowable  element,  then,  but  not  till  then,  does  the  idea 
God  present  itself  to  us.  So  at  coroners'  inquests  juries  never 
say  the  deceased  died  by  the  visitation  of  God  if  they  know 
any  of  the  more  proximate  causes. 

It  is  not  God,  therefore,  who  sows  the  corn — we  could 
sow  corn  ourselves,  we  can  see  the  man  with  a  bag  in  his  hand 


326  First  Principles 

walking  over  ploughed  fields  and  sowing  the  corn  broadcast — 
but  it  is  God  who  made  the  man  who  goes  about  with  the 
bag,  and  who  makes  the  corn  sprout,  for  we  do  not  follow 
the  processes  that  take  place  here. 

As  long  as  we  knew  nothing  about  what  caused  this  or  that 
weather  we  used  to  ascribe  it  to  God's  direct  action  and  pray 
him  to  change  it  according  to  our  wants :  now  that  we  know 
more  about  the  weather  there  is  a  growing  disinclination 
among  clergymen  to  pray  for  rain  or  dry  weather,  while 
laymen  look  to  nothing  but  the  barometer.  So  people  do 
not  say  God  has  shown  them  this  or  that  when  they  have 
just  seen  it  in  the  newspapers ;  they  would  only  say  that  God 
had  shown  it  them  if  it  had  come  into  their  heads  suddenly 
and  after  they  had  tried  long  and  vainly  to  get  at  this  par- 
ticular point. 

To  lament  that  we  cannot  be  more  conscious  of  God  and 
understand  him  better  is  much  like  lamenting  that  we  are  not 
more  conscious  of  our  circulation  and  digestion.  Provided 
we  live  according  to  familiar  laws  of  health,  the  less  we  think 
about  circulation  and  digestion  the  better;  and  so  with  the 
ordinary  rules  of  good  conduct,  the  less  we  think  about  God 
the  better. 

To  know  God  better  is  only  to  realise  more  fully  how  im- 
possible it  is  that  we  should  ever  know  him  at  all.  I  cannot 
tell  which  is  the  more  childish — to  deny  him,  or  to  attempt 
to  define  him. 

Scylla  and  Charybdis 

They  are  everywhere.  Just  now  coming  up  Great  Russell 
Street  I  loitered  outside  a  print  shop.  There  they  were  as 
usual — Hogarth's  Idle  and  Virtuous  Apprentices.  The  idle 
apprentice  is  certainly  Scylla,  but  is  not  the  virtuous  appren- 
tice just  as  much  Charybdis?  Is  he  so  greatly  preferable? 
Is  not  the  right  thing  somewhere  between  the  two  ?  And  does 
not  the  art  of  good  living  consist  mainly  in  a  fine  perception 
of  when  to  edge  towards  the  idle  and  when  towards  the  vir- 
tuous apprentice  ? 

When  John  Bunyan  (or  Richard  Baxter,  or  whoever  it 
was)  said  "There  went  John  Bunyan,  but  for  the  grace  of 
God"  (or  whatever  he  did  say),  had  he  a  right  to  be  so  cock- 


First  Principles  327 

sure  that  the  criminal  on  whom  he  was  looking  was  not  say- 
ing much  the  same  thing  as  he  looked  upon  John  Bunyan? 
Does  any  one  who  knows  me  doubt  that  if  I  were  offered  my 
choice  between  a  bishopric  and  a  halter,  I  should  choose  the 
halter?  I  believe  half  the  bishops  would  choose  the  halter 
themselves  if  they  had  to  do  it  over  again. 

Philosophy 

As  a  general  rule  philosophy  is  like  stirring  mud  or  not 
letting  a  sleeping  dog  lie.  It  is  an  attempt  to  deny,  circum- 
vent or  otherwise  escape  from  the  consequences  of  the  inter- 
lacing of  the  roots  of  things  with  one  another.  It  professes 
to  appease  our  ultimate  "Why?"  though  in  truth  it  is  gen- 
erally the  solution  of  a  simplex'  ignotum  by  a  complex  ig- 
notius.  This,  at  least,  is  my  experience  of  everything  that 
has  been  presented  to  me  as  philosophy.  I  have  often  had 
my  "Why"  answered  with  so  much  mystifying  matter  that  I 
have  left  off  pressing  it  through  fatigue.  But  this  is  not 
having  my  ultimate  "Why?"  appeased.  It  is  being  knocked 
out  of  time. 

Philosophy  and  Equal  Temperament 

It  is  with  philosophy  as  with  just  intonation  on  a  piano, 
if  you  get  everything  quite  straight  and  on  all  fours  in  one 
department,  in  perfect  tune,  it  is  delightful  so  long  as  you 
keep  well  in  the  middle  of  the  key;  but  as  soon  as  you 
modulate  you  find  the  new  key  is  out  of  tune  and  the  more 
remotely  you  modulate  the  more  out  of  tune  you  get.  The 
only  way  is  to  distribute  your  error  by  equal  temperament 
and  leave  common  sense  to  make  the  correction  in  philoso- 
phy which  the  ear  does  instantaneously  and  involuntarily  in 
music. 

Hedging  the  Cuckoo 

People  will  still  keep  trying  to  find  some  formula  that 
shall  hedge-in  the  cuckoo  of  mental  phenomena  to  their 
satisfaction.  Half  the  books — nay,  all  of  them  that  deal  with 
thought  and  its  ways  in  the  academic  spirit — are  but  so  many 
of  these  hedges  in  various  stages  of  decay. 


328  First  Principles 

God  and  Philosophies 

All  philosophies,  if  you  ride  them  home,  are  nonsense; 
but  some  are  greater  nonsense  than  others.  It  is  perhaps 
because  God  does  not  set  much  store  by  or  wish  to  encourage 
them  that  he  has  attached  such  very  slender  rewards  to 
them. 

Common  Sense,  Reason  and  Faith 

Reason  is  not  the  ultimate  test  of  truth  nor  is  it  the  court 
of  first  instance. 

For  example :  A  man  questions  his  own  existence ;  he  ap- 
plies first  to  the  court  of  mother-wit  and  is  promptly  told 
that  he  exists;  he  appeals  next  to  reason  and,  after  some 
wrangling,  is  told  that  the  matter  is  very  doubtful;  he  pro- 
ceeds to  the  equity  of  that  reasonable  faith  which  inspires  and 
transcends  reason,  and  the  judgment  of  the  court  of  first 
instance  is  upheld  while  that  of  reason  is  reversed. 

Nevertheless  it  is  folly  to  appeal  from  reason  to  faith 
unless  one  is  pretty  sure  of  a  verdict  and,  in  most  cases 
about  which  we  dispute  seriously,  reason  is  as  far  as  we 
need  go. 

The  Credit  System 

The  whole  world  is  carried  on  on  the  credit  system;  if 
every  one  were  to  demand  payment  in  hard  cash,  there  would 
be  universal  bankruptcy.  We  think  as  we  do  mainly  because 
other  people  think  so.  But  if  every  one  stands  on  every  one 
else,  what  does  the  bottom  man  stand  on  ?  Faith  is  no  foun- 
dation, for  it  rests  in  the  end  on  reason.  Reason  is  no  founda- 
tion, for  it  rests  upon  faith. 

Argument 

We  are  not  won  by  argument,  which  is  like  reading  and 
writing  and  disappears  when  there  is  need  of  such  vanity, 
or  like  colour  that  vanishes  with  too  much  light  or  shade,  or 
like  sound  that  becomes  silence  in  the  extremes.  Argument 
is  useless  when  there  is  either  no  conviction  at  all  or  a  very 
strong  conviction.  It  is  a  means  of  conviction  and  as  such 


First  Principles  329 

belongs  to  the  means  of  conviction,  not  to  the  extremes.  We 
are  not  won  by  arguments  that  we  can  analyse,  but  by  tone 
and  temper,  by  the  manner  which  is  the  man  himself. 

Logic  and  Philosophy 

When  you  have  got  all  the  rules  and  all  the  lore  of  philoso- 
phy and  logic  well  into  your  head,  and  have  spent  years  in 
getting  to  understand  at  any  rate  what  they  mean  and  have 
them  at  command,  you  will  know  less  for  practical  purposes 
than  one  who  has  never  studied  logic  or  philosophy. 

Science 

If  it  tends  to  thicken  the  crust  of  ice  on  which,  as  it  were, 
we  are  skating,  it  is  all  right.  If  it  tries  to  find,  or  professes 
to  have  found,  the  solid  ground  at  the  bottom  of  the  water, 
it  is  all  wrong.  Our  business  is  with  the  thickening  of  this 
crust  by  extending  our  knowledge  downward  from  above,  as 
ice  gets  thicker  while  the  frost  lasts;  we  should  not  try  to 
freeze  upwards  from  the  bottom. 

Religion 

A  religion  only  means  something  so  certainly  posed  that 
nothing  can  ever  displace  it.  It  is  an  attempt  to  settle  first 
principles  so  authoritatively  that  no  one  need  so  much  as 
even  think  of  ever  re-opening  them  for  himself  or  feel  any, 
even  the  faintest,  misgiving  upon  the  matter.  It  is  an  at- 
tempt to  get  an  irrefragably  safe  investment,  and  this  cannot 
be  got,  no  matter  how  low  the  interest,  which  in  the  case 
of  religion  is  about  as  low  as  it  can  be. 

Any  religion  that  cannot  be  founded  on  half  a  sheet  of 
note-paper  will  be  bottom-heavy,  and  this,  in  a  matter  so 
essentially  of  sentiment  as  religion,  is  as  bad  as  being  top- 
heavy  in  a  material  construction.  It  must  of  course  catch 
on  to  reason,  but  the  less  it  emphasises  the  fact  the  better. 

Logic 

Logic  has  no  place  save  with  that  which  can  be  defined  in 
words.  It  has  nothing  to  do,  therefore,  with  those  deeper 


33°  First  Principles 

questions  that  have  got  beyond  words  and  consciousness.  To 
apply  logic  here  is  as  fatuous  as  to  disregard  it  in  cases  where 
it  is  applicable.  The  difficulty  lies,  as  it  always  does,  on  the 
border  lines  between  the  respective  spheres  of  influence. 

Logic  and  Faith 

Logic  is  like  the  sword — those  who  appeal  to  it  shall  perish 
by  it.  Faith  is  appealing  to  the  living  God,  and  one  may 
perish  by  that  too,  but  somehow  one  would  rather  perish 
that  way  than  the  other,  and  one  has  got  to  perish  sooner 
or  later. 

Common  Sense  and  Philosophy 

The  voices  of  common  sense  and  of  high  philosophy  some- 
times cross ;  but  common  sense  is  the  unalterable  canto  fermo 
and  philosophy  is  the  variable  counterpoint. 

First  Principles 

It  is  said  we  can  build  no  superstructure  without  a  founda- 
tion of  unshakable  principles.  There  are  no  such  principles. 
Or,  if  there  be  any,  they  are  beyond  our  reach — we  cannot 
fathom  them;  therefore,  qua  us,  they  have  no  existence, 
for  there  is  no  other  "is  not"  than  inconceivableness  by  our- 
selves. There  is  one  thing  certain,  namely,  that  we  can  have 
nothing  certain ;  therefore  it  is  not  certain  that  we  can  have 
nothing  certain.  We  are  as  men  who  will  insist  on  looking 
over  the  brink  of  a  precipice;  some  few  can  gaze  into  the 
abyss  below  without  losing  their  heads,  but  most  men  will 
grow  dizzy  and  fall.  The  only  thing  to  do  is  to  glance  at  the 
chaos  on  which  our  thoughts  are  founded,  recognise  that  it 
is  a  chaos  and  that,  in  the  nature  of  things,  no  theoretically 
firm  ground  is  even  conceivable,  and  then  to  turn  aside  with 
the  disgust,  fear  and  horror  of  one  who  has  been  looking  into 
his  own  entrails. 

Even  Euclid  cannot  lay  a  demonstrable  premise,  he  re- 
quires postulates  and  axioms  which  transcend  demonstration 
and  without  which  he  can  do  nothing.  His  superstructure  is 
demonstration,  his  ground  is  faith.  And  so  his  ultima  ratio 


First  Principles  33 l 

is  to  tell  a  man  that  he  is  a  fool  by  saying  "Which  is  absurd." 
If  his  opponent  chooses  to  hold  out  in  spite  of  this,  Euclid 
can  do  no  more.  Faith  and  authority  are  as  necessary  for 
him  as  for  any  one  else.  True,  he  does  not  want  us  to  believe 
very  much;  his  yoke  is  tolerably  easy,  and  he  will  not  call 
a  man  a  fool  until  he  will  have  public  opinion  generally  on 
his  side ;  but  none  the  less  does  he  begin  with  dogmatism  and 
end  with  persecution. 

There  is  nothing  one  cannot  wrangle  about.  Sensible  peo- 
ple will  agree  to  a  middle  course  founded  upon  a  few  gen- 
eral axioms  and  propositions  about  which,  right  or  wrong, 
they  will  not  think  it  worth  while  to  wrangle  for  some  time, 
and  those  who  reject  these  can  be  put  into  mad-houses.  The 
middle  way  may  be  as  full  of  hidden  rocks  as  the  other  ways 
are  of  manifest  ones,  but  it  is  the  pleasantest  while  we  can 
keep  to  it  and  the  dangers,  being  hidden,  are  less  alarming. 

In  practice  it  is  seldom  very  hard  to  do  one's  duty  when 
one  knows  what  it  is,  but  it  is  sometimes  exceedingly  diffi- 
cult to  find  this  out.  The  difficulty  is,  however,  often  re- 
ducible into  that  of  knowing  what  gives  one  pleasure,  and 
this,  though  difficult,  is  a  safer  guide  and  more  easily  dis- 
tinguished. In  all  cases  of  doubt,  the  promptings  of  a  kindly 
disposition  are  more  trustworthy  than  the  conclusions  of 
logic,  and  sense  is  better  than  science. 

Why  I  should  have  been  at  the  pains  to  write  such  truisms 
I  know  not. 


XXI 

Rebelliousness 

God  and  Life 

WE  regard  these  as  two  distinct  things  and  say  that  the  first 
made  the  second,  much  as,  till  lately,  we  regarded  memory 
and  heredity  as  two  distinct  things  having  less  connection 
than  even  that  supposed  to  exist  between  God  and  life. 
Now,  however,  that  we  know  heredity  to  be  only  a  neces- 
sary outcome,  development  and  manifestation  of  memory — 
so  that,  given  such  a  faculty  as  memory,  the  faculty  of 
heredity  follows  as  being  inherent  therein  and  bound  to 
issue  from  it — in  like  manner  presently,  instead  of  seeing 
life  as  a  thing  created  by  God,  we  shall  see  God  and  life  as 
one  thing,  there  being  no  life  without  God  nor  God  without 
life,  where  there  is  life  there  is  God  and  where  there  is  God 
there  is  life. 

They  say  that  God  is  love,  but  life  and  love  are  co-exten- 
sive; for  hate  is  but  a  mode  of  love,  as  life  and  death  lurk 
always  in  one  another ;  and  "God  is  life"  is  not  far  off  saying 
"God  is  love."  Again,  they  say,  "Where  there  is  life  there 
is  hope,"  but  hope  is  of  the  essence  of  God,  for  it  is  faith  and 
hope  that  have  underlain  all  evolution. 

God  and  Flesh 

The  course  of  true  God  never  did  run  smooth.  God  to  be 
of  any  use  must  be  made  manifest,  and  he  can  only  be  made 
manifest  in  and  through  flesh.  And  flesh  to  be  of  any  use 
(except  for  eating)  must  be  alive,  and  it  can  only  be  alive 
by  being  inspired  of  God.  The  trouble  lies  in  the  getting  the 
flesh  and  the  God  together  in  the  right  proportions.  There 
is  lots  of  God  and  lots  of  flesh,  but  the  flesh  has  always  got 

332 


Rebelliousness  333 

too  much  God  or  too  little,  and  the  God  has  always  too  little 
flesh  or  too  much. 

Gods  and  Prophets 

It  is  the  manner  of  gods  and  prophets  to  begin:  "Thou 
shalt  have  none  other  God  or  Prophet  but  me."  If  I  were  to 
start  as  a  god  or  a  prophet,  I  think  I  should  take  the  line: 
"Thou  shalt  not  believe  in  me.  Thou  shalt  not  have  me  for 
a  god.  Thou  shalt  worship  any  damned  thing  thou  likest 
except  me."  This  should  be  my  first  and  great  command- 
ment, and  my  second  should  be  like  unto  it.* 

Faith  and  Reason 

The  instinct  towards  brushing  faith  aside  and  being  strictly 
reasonable  is  strong  and  natural;  so  also  is  the  instinct  to- 
wards brushing  logic  and  consistency  on  one  side  if  they  be- 
come troublesome,  in  other  words — so  is  the  instinct  towards 
basing  action  on  a  faith  which  is  beyond  reason.  It  is  be- 
cause both  instincts  are  so  natural  that  so  many  accept  and 
so  many  reject  Catholicism.  The  two  go  along  for  some 
time  as  very  good  friends  and  then  fight;  sometimes  one 
beats  and  sometimes  the  other,  but  they  always  make  it  up 
again  and  jog  along  as  before,  for  they  have  a  great  respect 
for  one  another. 

God  and  the  Devil 

God's  merits  are  so  transcendent  that  it  is  not  surprising 
his  faults  should  be  in  reasonable  proportion.  The  faults  are, 
indeed,  on  such  a  scale  that,  when  looked  at  without  relation 
to  the  merits  with  which  they  are  interwoven,  they  become 
so  appalling  that  people  shrink  from  ascribing  them  to  the 
Deity  and  have  invented  the  Devil,  without  seeing  that  there 
would  be  more  excuse  for  God's  killing  the  Devil,  and  so 

*  "Above  all  things,  let  no  unwary  reader  do  me  the  injustice 
of  believing  in  me.  In  that  I  write  at  all  I  am  among  the  damned.  If 
he  must  believe  in  anything,  let  him  believe  in  the  music  of  Handel, 
the  painting  of  Giovanni  Bellini,  and  in  the  thirteenth  chapter  of 
St.  Paul's  First  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians"  (Life  and  Habit,  close  of 
Chapter  II). 


334  Rebelliousness 

getting  rid  of  evil,  than  there  can  be  for  his  failing  to  be 
everything  that  he  would  like  to  be. 

For  God  is  not  so  white  as  he  is  painted,  and  he  gets  on 
better  with  the  Devil  than  people  think.  The  Devil  is  too 
useful  for  him  to  wish  him  ill  and,  in  like  manner,  half  the 
Devil's  trade  would  be  at  an  end  should  any  great  mishap 
bring  God  well  down  in  the  world.  For  all  the  mouths  they 
make  at  one  another  they  play  into  each  other's  hands  and 
have  got  on  so  well  as  partners,  playing  Spenlow  and  Jorkins 
to  one  another,  for  so  many  years  that  there  seems  no  reason 
why  they  should  cease  to  do  so.  The  conception  of  them  as 
the  one  absolutely  void  of  evil  and  the  other  of  good  is  a 
vulgar  notion  taken  from  science  whose  priests  have  ever 
sought  to  get  every  idea  and  every  substance  pure  of  all 
alloy. 

God  and  the  Devil  are  about  as  four  to  three.  There  is 
enough  preponderance  of  God  to  make  it  far  safer  to  be  on 
his  side  than  on  the  Devil's,  but  the  excess  is  not  so  great  as 
his  professional  claqueurs  pretend  it  is.  It  is  like  gambling 
at  Monte  Carlo;  if  you  play  long  enough  you  are  sure  to 
lose,  but  now  and  again  you  may  win  a  great  deal  of  excellent 
money  if  you  will  only  cease  playing  the  moment  you  have 
won  it. 

Christianity 

i 

As  an  instrument  of  warfare  against  vice,  or  as  a  tool  for 
making  virtue,  Christianity  is  a  mere  flint  implement. 


Christianity  is  a  woman's  religion,  invented  by  women  and 
womanish  men  for  themselves.  The  Church's  one  foundation 
is  not  Christ,  as  is  commonly  said,  it  is  woman ;  and  calling 
the  Madonna  the  Queen  of  Heaven  is  only  a  poetical  way  of 
acknowledging  that  women  are  the  main  support  of  the 
priests. 

iii 

It  is  not  the  church  in  a  village  that  is  the  source  of  the 
mischief,  but  the  rectory.  I  would  not  touch  a  church  from 
one  end  of  England  to  the  other. 


Rebelliousness  335 

iv 

Christianity  is  only  seriously  pretended  by  some  among 
the  idle,  bourgeois  middle-classes.  The  working  classes  and 
the  most  cultured  intelligence  of  the  time  reach  by  short  cuts 
what  the  highways  of  our  schools  and  universities  mislead  us 
from  by  many  a  winding  bout,  if  they  do  not  prevent  our  ever 
reaching  it. 

v 

It  is  not  easy  to  say  which  is  the  more  obvious,  the  ante- 
cedent improbability  of  the  Christian  scheme  and  miracles, 
or  the  breakdown  of  the  evidences  on  which  these  are  sup- 
posed to  rest.  And  yet  Christianity  has  overrun  the  world. 

vi 

If  there  is  any  moral  in  Christianity,  if  there  is  anything 
to  be  learned  from  it,  if  the  whole  story  is  not  profitless  from 
first  to  last,  it  comes  to  this  that  a  man  should  back  his  own 
opinion  against  the  world's — and  this  is  a  very  risky  and  im- 
moral thing  to  do,  but  the  Lord  hath  mercy  on  whom  he  will 
have  mercy. 

vii 

Christianity  is  true  in  so  far  as  it  has  fostered  beauty  and 
false  in  so  far  as  it  has  fostered  ugliness.  It  is  therefore  not 
a  little  true  and  not  a  little  false. 

viii 

Christ  said  he  came  not  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil — but  he 
destroyed  more  than  he  fulfilled.  Every  system  that  is  to 
live  must  both  destroy  and  fulfil. 

Miracles 

They  do  more  to  unsettle  faith  in  the  existing  order  than 
to  settle  it  in  any  other;  similarly,  missionaries  are  more 
valuable  as  underminers  of  old  faiths  than  as  propagators  of 
new.  Miracles  are  not  impossible;  nothing  is  impossible  till 
we  have  got  an  incontrovertible  first  premise.  The  question 
is  not  "Are  the  Christian  miracles  possible?"  but  "Are 
they  convenient?  Do  they  fit  comfortably  with  our  other 
ideas?" 


336  Rebelliousness 

Wants  and  Creeds 

As  in  the  organic  world  there  is  no  organ,  so  in  the  world 
of  thought  there  is  no  thought,  which  may  not  be  called  into 
existence  by  long  persistent  effort.  If  a  man  wants  either  to 
believe  or  disbelieve  the  Christian  miracles  he  can  do  so  if 
he  tries  hard  enough;  but  if  he  does  not  care  whether  he 
believes  or  disbelieves  and  simply  wants  to  find  out  which 
side  has  the  best  of  it,  this  he  will  find  a  more  difficult  matter. 
Nevertheless  he  will  probably  be  able  to  do  this  too  if  he 
tries. 

Faith 

i 

The  reason  why  the  early  Christians  held  faith  in  such 
account  was  because  they  felt  it  to  be  a  feat  of  such  super- 
human difficulty. 

ii 

You  can  do  very  little  with  faith,  but  you  can  do  nothing 
without  it. 

iii 

We  are  all  agreed  that  too  much  faith  is  as  bad  as  too 
little,  and  too  little  as  bad  as  too  much;  but  we  differ  as 
to  what  is  too  much  and  what  too  little. 

iv 

It  is  because  both  Catholics  and  myself  make  faith,  not 
reason,  the  basis  of  our  system  that  I  am  able  to  be  easy  in 
mind  about  not  becoming  a  Catholic.  Not  that  I  ever  wanted 
to  become  a  Catholic,  but  I  mean  I  believe  I  can  beat  them 
with  their  own  weapons. 

v 

A  man  may  have  faith  as  a  mountain,  but  he  will  not  be 
able  to  say  to  a  grain  of  mustard  seed :  "Be  thou  removed, 
and  be  thou  cast  into  the  sea" — not  at  least  with  any  effect 
upon  the  mustard  seed — unless  he  goes  the  right  way  to  work 
by  putting  the  mustard  seed  into  his  pocket  and  taking  the 
train  to  Brighton. 

vi 

The  just  live  by  faith,  but  they  not  infrequently  also  die 
by  it. 


Rebelliousness  337 

The  Cuckoo  and  the  Moon 

The  difference  between  the  Christian  and  the  Mahomedan 
is  only  as  the  difference  between  one  who  will  turn  his  money 
when  he  first  hears  the  cuckoo,  but  thinks  it  folly  to  do  so  on 
seeing  the  new  moon,  and  one  who  will  turn  it  religiously  at 
the  new  moon,  but  will  scout  the  notion  that  he  need  do  so 
on  hearing  the  cuckoo. 

Buddhism 

i 

This  seems  to  be  a  jumble  of  Christianity  and  Life  and 
Hbbft. 

Theist  and  Atheist 

The  fight  between  them  is  as  to  whether  God  shall  be 
called  God  or  shall  have  some  other  name. 

The  Peculiar  People 

The  only  people  in  England  who  really  believe  in  God  are 
the  Peculiar  People.  Perhaps  that  is  why  they  are  called 
peculiar.  See  how  belief  in  an  anthropomorphic  God  divides 
allegiance  and  disturbs  civil  order  as  soon  as  it  becomes 
vital. 

Renan 

There  is  an  article  on  him  in  the  Times,  April  30,  1883, 
of  the  worst  Times  kind,  and  that  is  saying  much.  It  appears 
he  whines  about  his  lost  faith  and  professes  to  wish  that  he 
could  believe  as  he  believed  when  young.  No  sincere  man 
will  regret  having  attained  a  truer  view  concerning  anything 
which  he  has  ever  believed.  And  then  he  talks  about  the 
difficulties  of  coming  to  disbelieve  the  Christian  miracles  as 
though  it  were  a  great  intellectual  feat.  This  is  very  childish. 
I  hope  no  one  will  say  I  was  sorry  when  I  found  out  that 
there  was  no  reason  for  believing  in  heaven  and  hell.  My 
contempt  for  Renan  has  no  limits.  (Has  he  an  accent  to  his 
name?  I  despise  him  too  much  to  find  out.) 


338  Rebelliousness 

The  Spiritual  Treadmill 

The  Church  of  England  has  something  in  her  liturgy  of  the 
spiritual  treadmill.  It  is  a  very  nice  treadmill  no  doubt,  but 
Sunday  after  Sunday  we  keep  step  with  the  same  old  "We 
have  left  undone  that  which  we  ought  to  have  done ;  And  we 
have  done  those  things  which  we  ought  not  to  have  done" 
without  making  any  progress.  With  the  Church  of  Rome,  I 
understand  that  those  whose  piety  is  sufficiently  approved  are 
told  they  may  consider  themselves  as  a  finished  article  and 
that,  except  on  some  few  rare  festivals,  they  need  no  longer 
keep  on  going  to  church  and  confessing.  The  picture  is  com- 
pleted and  may  be  framed,  glazed  and  hung  up. 

The  Dim  Religious  Light 

A  light  cannot  be  religious  if  it  is  not  dim.  Religion  be- 
longs to  the  twilight  of  our  thoughts,  just  as  business  of  all 
kinds  to  their  full  daylight.  So  a  picture  which  may  be 
impressive  while  seen  in  a  dark  light  will  not  hold  its  own 
in  a  bright  one. 

The  Greeks  and  Romans  did  not  enquire  into  the  evidences 
on  which  their  belief  that  Minerva  sprang  full-armed  from 
the  brain  of  Jupiter  was  based.  If  they  had  written  books  of 
evidences  to  show  how  certainly  it  all  happened,  &c. — well, 
I  suppose  if  they  had  had  an  endowed  Church  with  some 
considerable  prizes,  they  would  have  found  means  to  hood- 
wink the  public. 

The  Peace  that  Passeth  Understanding 

Yes.  But  as  there  is  a  peace  more  comfortable  than  any 
understanding,  so  also  there  is  an  understanding  more  covet- 
able  than  any  peace. 

The  New  Testament 

If  it  is  a  testamentary  disposition  at  all,  it  is  so  drawn  that 
it  has  given  rise  to  incessant  litigation  during  the  last  nearly 
two  thousand  years  and  seems  likely  to  continue  doing  so 


Rebelliousness  339 

for  a  good  many  years  longer.  It  ought  never  to  have  been 
admitted  to  probate.  Either  the  testator  drew  it  himself, 
in  which  case  we  have  another  example  of  the  folly  of  trying 
to  make  one's  own  will,  or  if  he  left  it  to  the  authors  of  the 
several  books — this  is  like  employing  many  lawyers  to  do 
the  work  of  one. 

Christ  and  the  L.  &  N.W.  Railway 

Admitting  for  the  moment  that  Christ  can  be  said  to  have 
died  for  me  in  any  sense,  it  is  only  pretended  that  he  did  so 
in  the  same  sort  of  way  as  the  London  and  North  Western 
Railway  was  made  for  me.  Granted  that  I  am  very  glad  the 
railway  was  made  and  use  it  when  I  find  it  convenient,  I  do 
not  suppose  that  those  who  projected  and  made  the  line 
allowed  me  to  enter  into  their  thoughts;  the  debt  of  my 
gratitude  is  divided  among  so  many  that  the  amount  due 
from  each  one  is  practically  nil. 

The  Jumping  Cat 

God  is  only  a  less  jumping  kind  of  jumping  cat;  and 
those  who  worship  God  are  still  worshippers  of  the  jumping 
cat  all  the  time.  There  is  no  getting  away  from  the  jumping 
cat — if  I  climb  up  into  heaven,  it  is  there;  if  I  go  down  to 
hell,  it  is  there  also ;  if  I  take  the  wings  of  the  morning  and 
remain  in  the  uttermost  parts  of  the  sea,  even  there,  and  so 
on;  it  is  about  my  path  and  about  my  bed  and  spieth  out 
all  my  ways.  It  is  the  eternal  underlying  verity  or  the  eternal 
underlying  lie,  as  people  may  choose  to  call  it. 

Personified  Science 

Science  is  being  daily  more  and  more  personified  and 
anthropomorphised  into  a  god.  By  and  by  they  will  say  that 
science  took  our  nature  upon  him,  and  sent  down  his  only 
begotten  son,  Charles  Darwin,  or  Huxley,  into  the  world  so 
that  those  who  believe  in  him,  &c. ;  and  they  will  burn  people 
for  saying  that  science,  after  all,  is  only  an  expression  for 
our  ignorance  of  our  own  ignorance. 


34°  Rebelliousness 

Science  and  Theology 

We  should  endow  neither;  we  should  treat  them  as  we 
treat  conservatism  and  liberalism,  encouraging  both,  so  that 
they  may  keep  watch  upon  one  another,  and  letting  them  go 
in  and  out  of  power  with  the  popular  vote  concerning  them. 

The  world  is  better  carried  on  upon  the  barrister  principle 
of  special  pleading  upon  two  sides  before  an  impartial  igno- 
rant tribunal,  to  whom  things  have  got  to  be  explained,  than 
it  would  be  if  nobody  were  to  maintain  any  opinion  in  which 
he  did  not  personally  believe. 

What  we  want  is  to  reconcile  both  science  and  theology 
with  sincerity  and  good  breeding,  to  make  our  experts  under- 
stand that  they  are  nothing  if  they  are  not  single-minded  and 
urbane.  Get  them  to  understand  this,  and  there  will  be  no 
difficulty  about  reconciling  science  and  theology. 

The  Church  and  the  Supernatural 

If  we  saw  the  Church  wishing  to  back  out  of  the  super- 
natural and  anxious  to  explain  it  away  where  possible,  we 
would  keep  our  disbelief  in  the  supernatural  in  the  back- 
ground, as  far  as  we  could,  and  would  explain  away  our  re- 
jection of  the  miracles,  as  far  as  was  decent ;  furthermore  we 
would  approximate  our  language  to  theirs  wherever  possible, 
and  insist  on  the  points  on  which  we  are  all  agreed,  rather 
than  on  points  of  difference;  in  fact,  we  would  meet  them 
half  way  and  be  only  too  glad  to  do  it.  I  maintain  that  in 
my  books  I  actually  do  this  as  much  as  is  possible,  but  I  shall 
try  and  do  it  still  more.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  the 
Church  clings  to  the  miraculous  element  of  Christianity 
more  fondly  than  ever;  she  parades  it  more  and  more,  and 
shows  no  sign  of  wishing  to  give  up  even  the  smallest  part  of 
it.  It  is  this  which  makes  us  despair  of  being  able  to  do  any- 
thing with  her  and  feel  that  either  she  or  we  must  go. 

Gratitude  and  Revenge 

Gratitude  is  as  much  an  evil  to  be  minimised  as  revenge 
is.  Justice,  our  law  and  our  law  courts  are  for  the  taming 


Rebelliousness  34 l 

and  regulating  of  revenge.  Current  prices  and  markets  and 
commercial  regulations  are  for  the  taming  of  gratitude  and 
its  reduction  from  a  public  nuisance  to  something  which 
shall  at  least  be  tolerable.  Revenge  and  gratitude  are  correla- 
tive terms.  Our  system  of  commerce  is  a  protest  against  the 
unbridled  licence  of  gratitude.  Gratitude,  in  fact,  like  re- 
venge, is  a  mistake  unless  under  certain  securities. 

Cant  and  Hypocrisy 

We  should  organise  a  legitimate  channel  for  instincts  so 
profound  as  these,  just  as  we  have  found  it  necessary  to  do 
with  lust  and  revenge  by  the  institutions  of  marriage  and  the 
law  courts.  This  is  the  raisan  d'etre  of  the  church.  You 
kill  a  man  just  as  much  whether  you  murder  him  or  hang  him 
after  the  formalities  of  a  trial.  And  so  with  lust  and  mar- 
riage, mutatis  mutandis.  So  again  with  the  professions  of  re- 
ligion and  medicine.  You  swindle  a  man  as  much  when  you 
sell  him  a  drug  of  whose  action  you  are  ignorant,  and  tell  him 
it  will  protect  him  from  disease,  as  when  you  give  him  a  bit 
of  bread,  which  you  assure  him  is  the  body  of  Jesus  Christ, 
and  then  send  a  plate  round  for  a  subscription.  You  swindle 
him  as  much  by  these  acts  as  if  you  picked  his  pocket,  or 
obtained  money  from  him  under  false  pretences  in  any  other 
way;  but  you  swindle  him  according  to  the  rules  and  in  an 
authorised  way. 

Real  Blasphemy 

On  one  of  our  Sunday  walks  near  London  we  passed  a 
forlorn  and  dilapidated  Primitive  Methodist  Chapel.  The 
windows  were  a  good  deal  broken  and  there  was  a  notice  up 
offering  io/-  reward  to  any  one  who  should  give  such  infor- 
mation as  should  lead  to  the,  &c.  Cut  in  stone  over  the  door 
was  this  inscription,  and  we  thought  it  as  good  an  example 
of  real  blasphemy  as  we  had  ever  seen : 

When  God  makes  up  his  last  account 
Of  holy  children  in  his  mount, 
'Twill  be  an  honour  to  appear 
As  one  new  born  and  nourished  here. 


342  Rebelliousness 

The  English  Church  Abroad 

People  say  you  must  not  try  to  abolish  Christianity  until 
you  have  something  better  to  put  in  its  place.  They  might  as 
well  say  we  must  not  take  away  turnpikes  and  corn  laws  till 
we  have  some  other  hindrances  to  put  in  their  place.  Besides 
no  one  wants  to  abolish  Christianity — all  we  want  is  not  to 
be  snubbed  and  bullied  if  we  reject  the  miraculous  part  of  it 
for  ourselves. 

At  Biella  an  English  clergyman  asked  if  I  was  a  Roman 
Catholic.  I  said,  quite  civilly,  that  I  was  not  a  Catholic. 
He  replied  that  he  had  asked  me  not  if  I  was  a  Catholic  but 
if  I  was  a  Roman  Catholic.  What  was  I  ?  Was  I  an  Anglican 
Catholic  ?  So,  seeing  that  he  meant  to  argue,  I  replied : 

"I  do  not  know.  I  am  a  Londoner  and  of  the  same  religion 
as  people  generally  are  in  London." 

This  made  him  angry.    He  snorted : 

"Oh,  that's  nothing  at  all;"  and  almost  immediately  left 
the  table. 

As  much  as  possible  I  keep  away  from  English- frequented 
hotels  in  Italy  and  Switzerland  because  I  find  that  if  I  do 
not  go  to  service  on  Sunday  I  am  made  uncomfortable.  It  is 
this  bullying  that  I  want  to  do  away  with.  As  regards  Chris- 
tianity I  should  hope  and  think  that  I  am  more  Christian 
than  not. 

People  ought  to  be  allowed  to  leave  their  cards  at  church, 
instead  of  going  inside.  I  have  half  a  mind  to  try  this  next 
time  I  am  in  a  foreign  hotel  among  English  people. 

Drunkenness 

When  we  were  at  Shrewsbury  the  other  day,  coming  up  the 
Abbey  Foregate,  we  met  a  funeral  and  debated  whether  or 
not  to  take  our  hats  off.  We  always  do  in  Italy,  that  is  to 
say  in  the  country  and  in  villages  and  small  towns,  but  we 
have  been  told  that  it  is  not  the  custom  to  do  so  in  large 
towns  and  in  cities,  which  raises  a  question  as  to  the  exact 
figure  that  should  be  reached  by  the  population  of  a  place 
before  one  need  not  take  off  one's  hat  to  a  funeral  in  one  of 
its  streets.  At  Shrewsbury  seeing  no  one  doing  it  we  thought 


Rebelliousness  343 

it  might  look  singular  and  kept  ours  on.  My  friend  Mr. 
Phillips,  the  tailor,  was  in  one  carriage,  I  did  not  see  him, 
but  he  saw  me  and  afterwards  told  me  he  had  pointed  me 
out  to  a  clergyman  who  was  in  the  carriage  with  him. 

"Oh,"  said  the  clergyman,  "then  that's  the  man  who  says 
England  owes  all  her  greatness  to  intoxication." 

This  is  rather  a  free  translation  of  what  I  did  say;  but 
it  only  shows  how  impossible  it  is  to  please  those  who  do  not 
wish  to  be  pleased.  Tennyson  may  talk  about  the  slow  sad 
hours  that  bring  us  all  things  ill  and  all  good  things  from 
evil,  because  this  is  vague  and  indefinite;  but  I  may  not  say 
that,  in  spite  of  the  terrible  consequences  of  drunkenness, 
man's  intellectual  development  would  not  have  reached  its 
present  stage  without  the  stimulus  of  alcohol — which  I  believe 
to  be  both  perfectly  true  and  pretty  generally  admitted — 
because  this  is  definite.  I  do  not  think  I  said  more  than  this 
and  am  sure  that  no  one  can  detest  drunkenness  more  than  I 
do.*  It  seems  to  me  it  will  be  wiser  in  me  not  to  try  to  make 
headway  at  Shrewsbury. 

Hell-Fire 

If  Vesuvius  does  not  frighten  those  who  live  under  it,  is  it 
likely  that  Hell-fire  should  frighten  any  reasonable  person  ? 

I  met  a  traveller  who  had  returned  from  Hades  where  he 
had  conversed  with  Tantalus  and  with  others  of  the  shades. 
They  all  agreed  that  for  the  first  six,  or  perhaps  twelve, 
months  they  disliked  their  punishment  very  much;  but  after 
that,  it  was  like  shelling  peas  on  a  hot  afternoon  in  July. 
They  began  by  discovering  (no  doubt  long  after  the  fact  had 
been  apparent  enough  to  every  one  else)  that  they  had  not 
been  noticing  what  they  were  doing  so  much  as  usual,  and 
that  they  had  been  even  thinking  of  something  else.  From 
this  moment,  the  automatic  stage  of  action  having  set  in,  the 
progress  towards  always  thinking  of  something  else  was  rapid 
and  they  soon  forgot  that  they  were  undergoing  any  punish- 
ment. 

*  "No  one  can  hate  drunkenness  more  than  I  do,  but  I  am  con- 
fident the  human  intellect  owes  its  superiority  over  that  of  the  lower 
animals  in  great  measure  to  the  stimulus  which  alcohol  has  given  to 
imagination — imagination  being  little  else  than  another  name  for 
illusion"  (Alps  and  Sanctuaries,  Chapter  III). 


344  Rebelliousness 

Tantalus  did  get  a  little  something  not  infrequently ;  water 
stuck  to  the  hairs  of  his  body  and  he  gathered  it  up  in  his 
hand;  he  also  got  many  an  apple  when  the  wind  was  nap- 
ping as  it  had  to  do  sometimes.  Perhaps  he  could  have  done 
with  more,  but  he  got  enough  to  keep  him  going  quite  com- 
fortably. His  sufferings  were  nothing  as  compared  with 
those  of  a  needy  heir  to  a  fortune  whose  father,  or  whoever 
it  may  be,  catches  a  dangerous  bronchitis  every  winter  but 
invariably  recovers  and  lives  to  91,  while  the  heir  survives 
him  a  month  having  been  worn  out  with  long  expectation. 

Sisyphus  had  never  found  any  pleasure  in  life  comparable 
to  the  delight  of  seeing  his  stone  bound  down-hill,  and  in  so 
timing  its  rush  as  to  inflict  the  greatest  possible  scare  on  any 
unwary  shade  who  might  be  wandering  below.  He  got  so 
great  and  such  varied  amusement  out  of  this  that  his  labour 
had  become  the  automatism  of  reflex  action — which  is,  I 
understand,  the  name  applied  by  men  of  science  to  all  actions 
that  are  done  without  reflection.  He  was  a  pompous,  pon- 
derous old  gentleman,  very  irritable  and  always  thinking  that 
the  other  shades  were  laughing  at  him  or  trying  to  take  ad- 
vantage of  him.  There  were  two,  however,  whom  he  hated 
with  a  fury  that  tormented  him  far  more  seriously  than  any- 
thing else  ever  did.  The  first  of  these  was  Archimedes  who 
had  instituted  a  series  of  experiments  in  regard  to  various 
questions  connected  with  mechanics  and  had  conceived  a 
scheme  by  which  he  hoped  to  utilise  the  motive  power  of  the 
stone  for  the  purpose  of  lighting  Hades  with  electricity.  The 
other  was  Agamemnon,  who  took  good  care  to  keep  out  of 
the  stone's  way  when  it  was  more  than  a  quarter  of  the 
distance  up  the  slope,  but  who  delighted  in  teasing  Sisyphus 
so  long  as  he  considered  it  safe  to  dp  so.  Many  of  the  other 
shades  took  daily  pleasure  in  gathering  together  about  stone- 
time  to  enjoy  the  fun  and  to  bet  on  how  far  the  stone  would 
roll. 

As  for  Tityus — what  is  a  bird  more  or  less  on  a  body  that 
covers  nine  acres  ?  He  found  the  vultures  a  gentle  stimulant 
to  the  liver  without  which  it  would  have  become  congested. 

Sir  Isaac  Newton  was  intensely  interested  in  the  hygro- 
metric  and  barometric  proceedings  of  the  Danaids. 

"At  any  rate,"  said  one  of  them  to  my  informant,  "if  we 
really  are  being  punished,  for  goodness'  sake  don't  say  any- 


Rebelliousness  345 

thing  about  it  or  we  may  be  put  to  other  work.  You  see,  we 
must  be  doing  something,  and  now  we  know  how  to  do  this, 
we  don't  want  the  bother  of  learning  something  new.  You 
may  be  right,  but  we  have  not  got  to  make  our  living  by  it, 
and  what  in  the  name  of  reason  can  it  matter  whether  the 
sieves  ever  get  full  or  not  ?" 

My  traveller  reported  much  the  same  with  regard  to  the 
eternal  happiness  on  Mount  Olympus.  Hercules  found  Hebe 
a  fool  and  could  never  get  her  off  his  everlasting  knee.  He 
would  have  sold  his  soul  to  find  another  -^Bgisthus. 

So  Jove  saw  all  this  and  it  set  him  thinking. 

"It  seems  to  me,"  said  he,  "that  Olympus  and  Hades  are 
both  failures." 

Then  he  summoned  a  council  and  the  whole  matter  was 
thoroughly  discussed.  In  the  end  Jove  abdicated,  and  the 
gods  came  down  from  Olympus  and  assumed  mortality.  They 
had  some  years  of  very  enjoyable  Bohemian  existence  going 
about  as  a  company  of  strolling  players  at  French  and 
Belgian  town  fairs;  after  which  they  died  in  the  usual  way, 
having  discovered  at  last  that  it  does  not  matter  how  high 
up  or  how  low  down  you  are,  that  happiness  and  misery  are 
not  absolute  but  depend  on  the  direction  in  which  you  are 
tending  and  consist  in  a  progression  towards  better  or  worse, 
and  that  pleasure,  like  pain  and  like  everything  that  grows, 
holds  in  perfection  but  a  little  moment. 


XXII 
Reconciliation 


Religion 

BY  religion  I  mean  a  living  sense  that  man  proposes  and  God 
disposes,  that  we  must  watch  and  pray  that  we  enter  not  into 
temptation,  that  he  who  thinketh  he  standeth  must  take  heed 
lest  he  fall,  and  the  countless  other  like  elementary  maxims 
which  a  man  must  hold  as  he  holds  life  itself  if  he  is  to  be 
a  man  at  all. 

If  religion,  then,  is  to  be  formulated  and  made  tangible 
to  the  people,  it  can  only  be  by  means  of  symbols,  counters 
and  analogies,  more  or  less  misleading,  for  no  man  professes 
to  have  got  to  the  root  of  the  matter  and  to  have  seen  the 
eternal  underlying  verity  face  to  face — and  even  though  he 
could  see  it  he  could  not  grip  it  and  hold  it  and  convey  it 
to  another  who  has  not.  Therefore  either  these  feelings  must 
be  left  altogether  unexpressed  and,  if  unexpressed,  then  soon 
undeveloped  and  atrophied,  or  they  must  be  expressed  by 
the  help  of  images  or  idols — by  the  help  of  something  not 
more  actually  true  than  a  child's  doll  is  to  a  child,  but  yet 
helpful  to  our  weakness  of  understanding,  as  the  doll 
no  doubt  gratifies  and  stimulates  the  motherly  instinct  in 
the  child. 

Therefore  we  ought  not  to  cavil  at  the  visible  superstition 
and  absurdity  of  much  on  which  religion  is  made  to  rest,  for 
the  unknown  can  never  be  satisfactorily  rendered  into  the 
known.  To  get  the  known  from  the  unknown  is  to  get  some- 
thing out  of  nothing,  a  thing  which,  though  it  is  being  done 
daily  in  every  fraction  of  every  second  everywhere,  is  logi- 
cally impossible  of  conception,  and  we  can  only  think  by  logic, 
for  what  is  not  in  logic  is  not  in  thought.  So  that  the  attempt 

346 


Reconciliation  347 

to  symbolise  the  unknown  is  certain  to  involve  inconsistencies 
and  absurdities  of  all  kinds  and  it  is  childish  to  complain 
of  their  existence  unless  one  is  prepared  to  advocate  the 
stifling  of  all  religious  sentiment,  and  this  is  like  trying  to 
stifle  hunger  or  thirst.  To  be  at  all  is  to  be  religious  more  or 
less.  There  never  was  any  man  who  did  not  feel  that  behind 
this  world  and  above  it  and  about  it  there  is  an  unseen  world 
greater  and  more  incomprehensible  than  anything  he  can 
conceive,  and  this  feeling,  so  profound  and  so  universal, 
needs  expression.  If  expressed  it  can  only  be  so  by  the  help 
of  inconsistencies  and  errors.  These,  then,  are  not  to  be 
ordered  impatiently  out  of  court;  they  have  grown  up  as 
the  best  guesses  at  truth  that  could  be  made  at  any  given  time, 
but  they  must  become  more  or  less  obsolete  as  our  knowledge 
of  truth  is  enlarged.  Things  become  known  which  were 
formerly  unknown  and,  though  this  brings  us  no  nearer  to 
ultimate  universal  truth,  yet  it  shows  us  that  many  of  our 
guesses  were  wrong.  Everything  that  catches  on  to  realism 
and  naturalism  as  much  as  Christinity  does  must  be  affected 
by  any  profound  modification  in  our  views  of  realism  and 
naturalism. 

God  and  Convenience 

I  do  not  know  or  care  whether  the  expression  "God"  has 
scientific  accuracy  or  no,  nor  yet  whether  it  has  theological 
value;  I  know  nothing  either  of  one  or  the  other,  beyond 
looking  upon  the  recognised  exponents  both  of  science  and 
theology  with  equal  distrust;  but  for  convenience,  I  am  sure 
that  there  is  nothing  like  it — I  mean  for  convenience  of  get- 
ting quickly  at  the  right  or  wrong  of  a  matter.  While  you 
are  fumbling  away  with  your  political  economy  or  your  bibli- 
cal precepts  to  know  whether  you  shall  let  old  Mrs.  So-and- 
so  have  5/-  or  no,  another,  who  has  just  asked  himself  which 
would  be  most  well-pleasing  in  the  sight  of  God,  will  be  told 
in  a  moment  that  he  should  give  her — or  not  give  her — the 
5/-.  As  a  general  rule  she  had  better  have  the  5/-  at  once, 
but  sometimes  we  must  give  God  to  understand  that,  though 
we  should  be  very  glad  to  do  what  he  would  have  of  us  if  we 
reasonably  could,  yet  the  present  is  one  of  those  occasions 
on  which  we  must  decline  to  do  so. 


348  Reconciliation 

The  World 

Even  the  world,  so  mondain  as  it  is,  still  holds  instinctively 
and  as  a  matter  of  faith  unquestionable  that  those  who  have 
died  by  the  altar  are  worthier  than  those  who  have  lived  by  it, 
when  to  die  was  duty. 

Blasphemy 

I  begin  to  understand  now  what  Christ  meant  when  he 
said  that  blasphemy  against  the  Holy  Ghost  was  unforgive- 
able,  while  speaking  against  the  Son  of  Man  might  be  for- 
given. He  must  have  meant  that  a  man  may  be  pardoned  for 
being  unable  to  believe  in  the  Christian  mythology,  but  that  if 
he  made  light  of  that  spirit  which  the  common  conscience  of 
all  men,  whatever  their  particular  creed,  recognises  as  divine, 
there  was  no  hope  for  him.  No  more  there  is. 

Gaining  One's  Point 

It  is  not  he  who  gains  the  exact  point  in  dispute  who 
scores  most  in  controversy,  but  he  who  has  shown  the  most 
forbearance  and  the  better  temper. 

The  Voice  of  Common  Sense 

It  is  this,  and  not  the  Voice  of  the  Lord,  which  maketh 
men  to  be  of  one  mind  in  an  house.  But  then,  the  Voice  of 
the  Lord  is  the  voice  of  common  sense  which  is  shared  by  all 
that  is. 

Amendes  Honorables 

There  is  hardly  an  offence  so  great  but  if  it  be  frankly 
apologised  for  it  is  easily  both  forgiven  and  forgotten.  There 
is  hardly  an  offence  so  small  but  it  rankles  if  he  who  has 
committed  it  does  not  express  proportionate  regret.  Ex- 
pressions of  regret  help  genuine  regret  and  induce  amendment 
of  life,  much  as  digging  a  channel  helps  water  to  flow,  though 
it  does  not  make  the  water.  If  a  man  refuses  to  make  them 
and  habitually  indulges  his  own  selfishness  at  the  expense  of 
what  is  due  to  other  people,  he  is  no  better  than  a  drunkard 


Reconciliation  349 

or  a  debauchee,  and  I  have  no  more  respect  for  him  than  I 
have  for  the  others. 

We  all  like  to  forgive,  and  we  all  love  best  not  those  who 
offend  us  least,  nor  those  who  have  done  most  for  us,  but 
those  who  make  it  most  easy  for  us  to  forgive  them. 

So  a  man  may  lose  both  his  legs  and  live  for  years  in 
health  if  the  amputation  has  been  clean  and  skilful,  whereas 
a  pea  in  his  boot  may  set  up  irritation  which  must  last  as 
long  as  the  pea  is  there  and  may  in  the  end  kill  him. 

Forgiveness  and  Retribution 

It  is  no  part  of  the  bargain  that  we  are  never  to  commit 
trespasses.  The  bargain  is  that  if  we  would  be  forgiven  we 
must  forgive  them  that  trespass  against  us.  Nor  again  is  it 
part  of  the  bargain  that  we  are  to  let  a  man  hob-nob  with  us 
when  we  know  him  to  be  a  thorough  blackguard,  merely  on 
the  plea  that  unless  we  do  so  we  shall  not  be  forgiving  him  his 
trespasses.  No  hard  and  fast  rule  can  be  laid  down,  each 
case  must  be  settled  instinctively  as  it  arises. 

As  a  sinner  I  am  interested  in  the  principle  of  forgiveness ; 
as  sinned  against,  in  that  of  retribution.  I  have  what  is  to  me 
a  considerable  vested  interest  in  both  these  principles,  but 
I  should  say  I  had  more  in  forgiveness  than  in  retribution. 
And  so  it  probably  is  with  most  people  or  we  should  have  had 
a  clause  in  the  Lord's  prayer :  "And  pay  out  those  who  have 
sinned  against  us  as  they  whom  we  have  sinned  against 
generally  pay  us  out." 

Inaccuracy 

I  am  not  sure  that  I  do  not  begin  to  like  the  correction  of 
a  mistake,  even  when  it  involves  my  having  shown  much 
ignorance  and  stupidity,  as  well  as  I  like  hitting  on  a  new 
idea.  It  does  comfort  one  so  to  be  able  to  feel  sure  that  one 
knows  how  to  tumble  and  how  to  retreat  promptly  and 
without  chagrin.  Being  bowled  over  in  inaccuracy,  when  I 
have  tried  to  verify,  makes  me  careful.  But  if  I  have  not 
tried  to  verify  and  then  turn  out  wrong,  this,  if  I  find  it  out, 
upsets  me  very  much  and  I  pray  that  I  may  be  found  out 
whenever  I  do  it. 


35°  Reconciliation 

Jutland  and  "Waitee" 

I  made  a  mistake  in  The  Authoress  of  the  Odyssey  [in  a 
note  on  p.  31]  when  I  said  "Scheria  means  Jutland — a  piece 
of  land  jutting  out  into  the  sea."  Jutland  means  the  Land  of 
the  Jutes. 

And  I  made  a  mistake  in  Alps  and  Sanctuaries  [Chap.  Ill], 
speaking  of  the  peasants  in  the  Val  Leventina  knowing  Eng- 
lish, when  I  said  "One  English  word  has  become  uni- 
versally adopted  by  the  Ticinesi  'themselves.  They  say 
'Waitee'  just  as  we  should  say  'Wait'  to  stop  some  one  from 
going  away.  It  is  abhorrent  to  them  to  end  a  word  with  a 
consonant  so  they  have  added  'ee/  but  there  can  be  no  doubt 
about  the  origin  of  the  word."  The  Avvocato  Negri  of 
Casale-Monf  errato  says  that  they  have  a  word  in  their  dialetto 
which,  if  ever  written,  would  appear  as  "vuaitee,"  it  means 
"stop"  or  "look  here,"  and  is  used  to  attract  attention.  This, 
or  something  like  it,  no  doubt  is  what  they  really  say  and 
has  no  more  to  do  with  waiting  than  Jutland  has  to  do  with 
jutting. 

The  Parables 

The  people  do  not  act  reasonably  in  a  single  instance.  The 
sower  was  a  bad  sower ;  the  shepherd  who  left  his  ninety  and 
nine  sheep  in  the  wilderness  was  a  foolish  shepherd ;  the  hus- 
bandman who  would  not  have  his  corn  weeded  was  no  farmer 
— and  so  on.  None  of  them  go  nearly  on  all  fours,  they  halt 
so  much  as  to  have  neither  literary  nor  moral  value  to  any 
but  slipshod  thinkers. 

Granted,  but  are  we  not  all  slipshod  thinkers  ? 

The  Irreligion  of  Orthodoxy 

We  do  not  fall  foul  of  Christians  for  their  religion,  but  for 
what  we  hold  to  be  their  want  of  religion — for  the  low  views 
they  take  of  God  and  of  his  glory,  and  for  the  unworthiness 
with  which  they  try  to  serve  him. 

Society  and    Christianity 

The  burden  of  society  is  really  a  very  light  one.  She  does 
not  require  us  to  believe  the  Christian  religion,  she  has  very 


Reconciliation  35 r 

vague  ideas  as  to  what  the  Christian  religion  is,  much  less 
does  she  require  us  to  practise  it.  She  is  quite  satisfied  if 
we  do  not  obtrude  our  disbelief  in  it  in  an  offensive  manner. 
Surely  this  is  no  very  grievous  burden. 

Sanctified  by  Faith 

No  matter  how  great  a  fraud  a  thing  may  have  been  or  be, 
if  it  has  passed  through  many  minds  an  aroma  of  life  attaches 
to  it  and  it  must  be  handled  with  a  certain  reverence.  A  thing 
or  a  thought  becomes  hallowed  if  it  has  been  long  and  strongly 
believed  in,  for  veneration,  after  a  time,  seems  to  get  into  the 
thing  venerated.  Look  at  Delphi — fraud  of  frauds,  yet  sanc- 
tified by  centuries  of  hope  and  fear  and  faith.  If  greater 
knowledge  shows  Christianity  to  have  been  founded  upon 
error,  still  greater  knowledge  shows  that  it  was  aiming  at  a 
truth. 

Ourselves  and  the  Clergy 

As  regards  the  best  of  the  clergy,  whether  English  or 
foreign,  I  feel  that  they  and  we  mean  in  substance  the  same 
thing,  and  that  the  difference  is  only  about  the  way  this  thing 
should  be  put  and  the  evidence  on  which  it  should  be  con- 
sidered to  rest. 

We  say  that  they  jeopardise  the  acceptance  of  the  prin- 
ciples which  they  and  we  alike  cordially  regard  as  fundamental 
by  basing  them  on  assertions  which  a  little  investigation 
shows  to  be  untenable.  They  reply  that  by  declaring  the  as- 
sertions to  be  untenable  we  jeopardise  the  principles.  We 
answer  that  this  is  not  so  and  that  moreover  we  can  find  bet- 
ter, safer  and  more  obvious  assertions  on  which  to  base  them. 

The  Rules  of  Life 

Whether  it  is  right  to  say  that  one  believes  in  God  and 
Christianity  without  intending  what  one  knows  the  hearer  in- 
tends one  to  intend  depends  on  how  much  or  how  little  the 
hearer  can  understand.  Life  is  not  an  exact  science,  it  is 
an  art.  Just  as  the  contention,  excellent  so  far  as  it  goes, 
that  each  is  to  do  what  is  right  in  his  own  eyes  leads,  when 
ridden  to  death,  to  anarchy  and  chaos,  so  the  contention 


352  Reconciliation 

that  every  one  should  be  either  self-effacing  or  truthful  to 
the  bitter  end  reduces  life  to  an  absurdity.  If  we  seek  real 
rather  than  technical  truth,  it  is  more  true  to  be  considerately 
untruthful  within  limits  than  to  be  inconsiderately  truthful 
without  them.  What  the  limits  are  we  generally  know  but 
cannot  say 

There  is  an  unbridgeable  chasm  between  thought  and  words 
that  we  must  jump  as  best  we  can,  and  it  is  just  here  that 
the  two  hitch  on  to  one  another.  The  higher  rules  of  life 
transcend  the  sphere  of  language;  they  cannot  be  gotten  by 
speech,  neither  shall  logic  be  weighed  for  the  price  thereof. 
They  have  their  being  in  the  fear  of  the  Lord  and  in  the 
departing  from  evil  without  even  knowing  in  words  what  the 
Lord  is,  nor  the  fear  of  the  Lord,  nor  yet  evil. 

Common  straightforwardness  and  kindliness  are  the  high- 
est points  that  man  or  woman  can  reach,  but  they  should 
no  more  be  made  matters  of  conversation  than  should  the 
lowest  vices.  Extremes  meet  here  as  elsewhere  and  the 
extremes  of  vice  and  virtue  are  alike  common  and  unmen- 
tionable. 

There  is  nothing  for  it  but  a  very  humble  hope  that  from 
the  Great  Unknown  Source  our  daily  insight  and  daily 
strength  may  be  given  us  with  our  daily  bread.  And  what  is 
this  but  Christianity,  whether  we  believe  that  Jesus  Christ 
rose  from  the  dead  or  not?  So  that  Christianity  is  like  a 
man's  soul — he  who  finds  may  lose  it  and  he  who  loses  may 
find  it. 

If,  then,  a  man  may  be  a  Christian  while  believing  himself 
hostile  to  all  that  some  consider  most  essential  in  Chris- 
tianity, may  he  not  also  be  a  free-thinker  (in  the  common 
use  of  the  word)  while  believing  himself  hostile  to  free- 
thought  ? 


XXIII 
Death 


Fore-Knowledge  of  Death 

No  one  thinks  he  will  escape  death,  so  there  is  no  disappoint- 
ment and,  as  long  as  we  know  neither  the  when  nor  the  how, 
the  mere  fact  that  we  shall  one  day  have  to  go  does  not  much 
affect  us ;  we  do  not  care,  even  though  we  know  vaguely  that 
we  have  not  long  to  live.  The  serious  trouble  begins  when 
death  becomes  definite  in  time  and  shape.  It  is  in  precise 
fore-knowledge,  rather  than  in  sin,  that  the  sting  of  death  is 
to  be  found ;  and  such  fore-knowledge  is  generally  withheld ; 
though,  strangely  enough,  many  would  have  it  if  they  could. 

Continued  Identity 

I  do  not  doubt  that  a  person  who  will  grow  out  of  me  as 
I  now  am,  but  of  whom  I  know  nothing  now  and  in  whom 
therefore  I  can  take  none  but  the  vaguest  interest,  will  one 
day  undergo  so  sudden  and  complete  a  change  that  his  friends 
must  notice  it  and  call  him  dead;  but  as  I  have  no  definite 
ideas  concerning  this  person,  not  knowing  whether  he  will  be 
a  man  of  59  or  79  or  any  age  between  these  two,  so  this  per- 
son will,  I  am  sure,  have  forgotten  the  very  existence  of  me 
as  I  am  at  this  present  moment.  If  it  is  said  that  no  mat- 
ter how  wide  a  difference  of  condition  may  exist  between 
myself  now  and  myself  at  the  moment  of  death,  or  how  com- 
plete the  forgetfulness  of  connection  on  either  side  may  be, 
yet  the  fact  of  the  one's  having  grown  out  of  the  other  by  an 
infinite  series  of  gradations  makes  the  second  personally  iden- 
tical with  the  first,  then  I  say  that  the  difference  between  the 
corpse  and  the  till  recently  living  body  is  not  great  enough, 
either  in  respect  of  material  change  or  of  want  of  memory 

353 


354  Death 

concerning  the  earlier  existence,  to  bar  personal  identity  and 
prevent  us  from  seeing  the  corpse  as  alive  and  a  continuation 
of  the  man  from  whom  it  was  developed,  though  having  tastes 
and  other  characteristics  very  different  from  those  it  had 
while  it  was  a  man. 

From  this  point  of  view  there  is  no  such  thing  as  death — 
I  mean  no  such  thing  as  the  death  which  we  have  commonly 
conceived  of  hitherto.  A  man  is  much  more  alive  when  he  is 
what  we  call  alive  than  when  he  is  what  we  call  dead;  but 
no  matter  how  much  he  is  alive,  he  is  still  in  part  dead,  and 
no  matter  how  much  he  is  dead,  he  is  still  in  part  alive,  and 
his  corpse-hood  is  connected  with  his  living  body-hood  by 
gradations  which  even  at  the  moment  of  death  are  ordinarily 
subtle;  and  the  corpse  does  not  forget  the  living  body  more 
completely  than  the  living  body  has  forgotten  a  thousand  or  a 
hundred  thousand  of  its  own  previous  states;  so  that  we 
should  see  the  corpse  as  a  person,  of  greatly  and  abruptly 
changed  habits  it  is  true,  but  still  of  habits  of  some  sort,  for 
hair  and  nails  continue  to  grow  after  death,  and  with  an  indi- 
viduality which  is  as  much  identical  with  that  of  the  person 
from  whom  it  has  arisen  as  this  person  was  with  himself  as 
an  embryo  of  a  week  old,  or  indeed  more  so. 

If  we  have  identity  between  the  embryo  and  the  octogen- 
arian, we  must  have  it  also  between  the  octogenarian  and  the 
corpse,  and  do  away  with  death  except  as  a  rather  striking 
change  of  thought  and  habit,  greater  indeed  in  degree  than, 
but  still,  in  kind,  substantially  the  same  as  any  of  the  changes 
which  we  have  experienced  from  moment  to  moment  through- 
out that  fragment  of  existence  which  we  commonly  call  our 
life;  so  that  in  sober  seriousness  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
absolute  death,  just  as  there  is  no  such  thing  as  absolute 
life. 

Either  this,  or  we  must  keep  death  at  the  expense  of 
personal  identity,  and  deny  identity  between  any  two  states 
which  present  considerable  differences  and  neither  of  which 
has  any  fore-knowledge  of,  or  recollection  of  the  other.  In 
this  case,  if  there  be  death  at  all,  it  is  some  one  else  who  dies 
and  not  we,  because  while  we  are  alive  we  are  not  dead,  and 
as  soon  as  we  are  dead  we  are  no  longer  ourselves. 

So  that  it  comes  in  the  end  to  this,  that  either  there  is  no 
such  thing  as  death  at  all,  or  else  that,  if  there  is,  it  is  some 


Death  355 

one  else  who  dies  and  not  we.  We  cannot  blow  hot  and  cold 
with  the  same  breath.  If  we  would  retain  personal  identity 
at  all,  we  must  continue  it  beyond  what  we  call  death,  in 
which  case  death  ceases  to  be  what  we  have  hitherto  thought 
it,  that  is  to  say,  the  end  of  our  being.  We  cannot  have  both 
personal  identity  and  death  too. 

Complete  Death 

To  die  completely,  a  person  must  not  only  forget  but  be 
forgotten,  and  he  who  is  not  forgotten  is  not  dead.  This  is 
as  old  as  non  ownis  moriar  and  a  great  deal  older,  but  very 
few  people  realise  it. 

Life  and  Death 

When  I  was  young  I  used  to  think  the  only  certain  thing 
about  life  was  that  I  should  one  day  die.  Now  I  think  the 
only  certain  thing  about  life  is  that  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  death. 

The  Defeat  of  Death 

There  is  nothing  which  at  once  affects  a  man  so  much  and 
so  little  as  his  own  death.  It  is  a  case  in  which  the  going-to- 
happen-ness  of  a  thing  is  of  greater  importance  than  the 
actual  thing  itself  which  cannot  be  of  importance  to  the  man 
who  dies,  for  Death  cuts  his  own  throat  in  the  matter  of  hurt- 
ing people.  As  a  bee  that  can  sting  once  but  in  the  stinging 
dies,  so  Death  is  dead  to  him  who  is  dead  already.  While  he 
is  shaking  his  wings,  there  is  brutum  fulmen  but  the  man  goes 
on  living,  frightened,  perhaps,  but  unhurt;  pain  and  sickness 
may  hurt  him  but  the  moment  Death  strikes  him  both  he  and 
Death  are  beyond  feeling.  It  is  as  though  Death  were  born 
anew  with  every  man;  the  two  protect  one  another  so  long 
as  they  keep  one  another  at  arm's  length,  but  if  they  once 
embrace  it  is  all  over  with  both. 

The  Torture  of  Death 

The  fabled  pains  of  Tantalus,  Sisyphus  and  all  the  rest  of 
them  show  what  an  instinctive  longing  there  is  in  all  men 


356  DeatH 

both  for  end  and  endlessness  of  both  good  and  ill,  but  as 
torture  they  are  the  merest  mockery  when  compared  with  the 
fruitless  chase  to  which  poor  Death  has  been  condemned  for 
ever  and  ever.  Does  it  not  seem  as  though  he  too  must  have 
committed  some  crime  for  which  his  sentence  is  to  be  for  ever 
grasping  after  that  which  becomes  non-existent  the  moment 
he  grasps  it?  But  then  I  suppose  it  would  be  with  him  as 
with  the  rest  of  the  tortured,  he  must  either  die  himself, 
which  he  has  not  done,  or  become  used  to  it  and  enjoy  the 
frightening  as  much  as  the  killing.  Any  pain  through  which  a 
man  can  live  at  all  becomes  unfelt  as  soon  as  it  becomes  habi- 
tual. Pain  consists  not  in  that  which  is  now  endured  but  in 
the  strong  memory  of  something  better  that  is  still  recent. 
And  so,  happiness  lies  in  the  memory  of  a  recent  worse  and 
the  expectation  of  a  better  that  is  to  come  soon. 


i 

The  fear  of  death  is  instinctive  because  in  so  many  past 
generations  we  have  feared  it.  But  how  did  we  come  to  know 
what  death  is  so  that  we  should  fear  it?  The  answer  is 
that  we  do  not  know  what  death  is  and  that  this  is  why  we 
fear  it. 

ii 

If  a  man  know  not  life  which  he  hath  seen  how  shall  he 
know  death  which  he  hath  not  seen? 

iii 

If  a  man  has  sent  his  teeth  and  his  hair  and  perhaps  two 
or  three  limbs  to  the  grave  before  him,  the  presumption 
should  be  that,  as  he  knows  nothing  further  of  these  when 
they  have  once  left  him,  so  will  he  know  nothing  of  the  rest 
of  him  when  it  too  is  dead.  The  whole  may  surely  be  argued 
from  the  parts. 

iv 

To  write  about  death  is  to  write  about  that  of  which  we 
have  had  little  practical  experience.  We  can  write  about  con- 
scious life,  but  we  have  no  consciousness  of  the  deaths  we 
daily  die.  Besides,  we  cannot  eat  our  cake  and  have  it.  We 


Death  357 

cannot  have  tabula  rasa  and  tabula  scripts  at  the  same  time. 
We  cannot  be  at  once  dead  enough  to  be  reasonably  registered 
as  such,  and  alive  enough  to  be  able  to  tell  people  all  about  it. 


There  will  come  a  supreme  moment  in  which  there  will 
be  care  neither  for  ourselves  nor  for  others,  but  a  complete 
abandon,  a  sans  souci  of  unspeakable  indifference,  and  this 
moment  will  never  be  taken  from  us ;  time  cannot  rob  us  of  it 
but,  as  far  as  we  are  concerned,  it  will  last  for  ever  and  ever 
without  flying.  So  that,  even  for  the  most  wretched  and 
most  guilty,  there  is  a  heaven  at  last  where  neither  moth  nor 
rust  doth  corrupt  and  where  thieves  do  not  break  through 
nor  steal.  To  himself  every  one  is  an  immortal :  he  may  know 
that  he  is  going  to  die,  but  he  can  never  know  that  he  is 
dead. 

vi 

If  life  is  an  illusion,  then  so  is  death — the  greatest  of  all 
illusions.  If  life  must  not  be  taken  too  seriously — then  so 
neither  must  death. 

vii 

The  dead  are  often  just  as  living  to  us  as  the  living  are, 
only  we  cannot  get  them  to  believe  it.  They  can  come  to  us, 
but  till  we  die  we  cannot  go  to  them.  To  be  dead  is  to  be 
unable  to  understand  that  one  is  alive. 

Dissolution 

Death  is  the  dissolving  of  a  partnership,  the  partners  to 
which  survive  and  go  elsewhere.  It  is  the  corruption  or 
breaking  up  of  that  society  which  we  have  called  Ourself. 
The  corporation  is  at  an  end,  both  its  soul  and  its  body  cease 
as  a  whole,  but  the  immortal  constituents  do  not  cease  and 
never  will.  The  souls  of  some  men  transmigrate  in  great  part 
into  their  children,  but  there  is  a  large  alloy  in  respect  both  of 
body  and  mind  through  sexual  generation ;  the  souls  of  other 
men  migrate  into  books,  pictures,  music,  or  what  not;  and 
every  one's  mind  migrates  somewhere,  whether  remembered 
and  admired  or  the  reverse.  The  living  souls  of  Handel, 
Shakespeare,  Rembrandt,  Giovanni  Bellini  and  the  other  great 


Death 

ones  appear  and  speak  to  us  in  their  works  with  less  alloy 
than  they  could  ever  speak  through  their  children ;  but  men's 
bodies  disappear  absolutely  on  death,  except  they  be  in  some 
measure  preserved  in  their  children  and  in  so  far  as  har- 
monics of  all  that  has  been  remain. 

On  death  we  do  not  lose  life,  we  only  lose  individuality; 
we  live  henceforth  in  others  not  in  ourselves.  Our  mistake 
has  been  in  not  seeing  that  death  is  indeed,  like  birth,  a 
salient  feature  in  the  history  of  the  individual,  but  one  which 
wants  exploding  as  the  end  of  the  individual,  no  less  than 
birth  wanted  exploding  as  his  beginning. 

Dying  is  only  a  mode  of  forgetting.  We  shall  see  this  more 
easily  if  we  consider  forgetting  to  be  a  mode  of  dying.  So 
the  ancients  called  their  River  of  Death,  Lethe — the  River 
of  Forgetfulness.  They  ought  also  to  have  called  their  River 
of  Life,  Mnemosyne — the  River  of  Memory.  We  should 
learn  to  tune  death  a  good  deal  flatter  than  according  to  re- 
ceived notions. 

The  Dislike  of  Death 

We  cannot  like  both  life  and  death  at  once;  no  one  can 
be  expected  to  like  two  such  opposite  things  at  the  same  time ; 
if  we  like  life  we  must  dislike  death,  and  if  we  leave  off  dis- 
liking death  we  shall  soon  die.  Death  will  always  be  more 
avoided  than  sought;  for  living  involves  effort,  perceived  or 
unperceived,  central  or  departmental,  and  this  will  only  be 
made  by  those  who  dislike  the  consequences  of  not  making  it 
more  than  the  trouble  of  making  it.  A  race,  therefore,  which 
is  to  exist  at  all  must  be  a  death-disliking  race,  for  it  is  only 
at  the  cost  of  death  that  we  can  rid  ourselves  of  all  aversion 
to  the  idea  of  dying,  so  that  the  hunt  after  a  philosophy  which 
shall  strip  death  of  his  terrors  is  like  trying  to  find  the  philo- 
sopher's stone  which  cannot  be  found  and  which,  if  found, 
would  defeat  its  own  object. 

Moreover,  as  a  discovery  which  should  rid  us  of  the  fear 
of  death  would  be  the  vainest,  so  also  it  would  be  the  most 
immoral  of  discoveries,  for  the  very  essence  of  morality  is 
involved  in  the  dislike  (within  reasonable  limits)  of  death. 
Morality  aims  at  a  maximum  of  comfortable  life  and  a 
minimum  of  death;  if  then,  a  minimum  of  death  and  a 
maximum  of  life  were  no  longer  held  worth  striving  for,  the 


Death  359 

whole  fabric  of  morality  would  collapse,  as  indeed  we  have 
it  on  record  that  it  is  apt  to  do  among  classes  that  from 
one  cause  or  another  have  come  to  live  in  disregard  and 
expectation  of  death. 

However  much  we  may  abuse  death  for  robbing  us  of  our 
friends — and  there  is  no  one  who  is  not  sooner  or  later  hit 
hard  in  this  respect — yet  time  heals  these  wounds  sooner  than 
we  like  to  own ;  if  the  heyday  of  grief  does  not  shortly  kill 
outright,  it  passes;  and  I  doubt  whether  most  men,  if  they 
were  to  search  their  hearts,  would  not  find  that,  could  they 
command  death  for  some  single  occasion,  they  would  be  more 
likely  to  bid  him  take  than  restore. 

Moreover,  death  does  not  blight  love  as  the  accidents  of 
time  and  life  do.  Even  the  fondest  grow  apart  if  parted; 
they  cannot  come  together  again,  not  in  any  closeness  or 
for  any  long  time.  Can  death  do  worse  than  this  ? 

The  memory  of  a  love  that  has  been  cut  short  by  death 
remains  still  fragrant  though  enfeebled,  but  no  recollection 
of  its  past  can  keep  sweet  a  love  that  has  dried  up  and 
withered  through  accidents  of  time  and  life. 


XXIV 
The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

Posthumous  Life 
i 

To  try  to  live  in  posterity  is  to  be  like  an  actor  who  leaps 
over  the  footlights  and  talks  to  the  orchestra. 


He  who  wants  posthumous  fame  is  as  one  who  would  entail 
land,  and  tie  up  his  money  after  his  death  as  tightly  and  for 
as  long  a  time  as  possible.  Still  we  each  of  us  in  our  own 
small  way  try  to  get  what  little  posthumous  fame  we  can. 

The  Test  of  Faith 

Why  should  we  be  so  avid  of  honourable  and  affectionate 
remembrance  after  death  ?  Why  should  we  hold  this  the  one 
thing  worth  living  or  dying  for  ?  Why  should  all  that  we  can 
know  or  feel  seem  but  a  very  little  thing  as  compared  with 
that  which  we  never  either  feel  or  know?  What  a  reversal 
of  all  the  canons  of  action  which  commonly  guide  mankind 
is  there  not  here?  But  however  this  may  be,  if  we  have  faith 
in  the  life  after  death  we  can  have  little  in  that  which  is  be- 
fore it,  and  if  we  have  faith  in  this  life  we  can  have  small 
faith  in  any  other. 

Nevertheless  there  is  a  deeply  rooted  conviction,  even  in 
many  of  those  in  whom  its  existence  is  least  apparent,  that 
honourable  and  affectionate  remembrance  after  death  with  a 
full  and  certain  hope  that  it  will  be  ours  is  the  highest  prize 
to  which  the  highest  calling  can  aspire.  Few  pass  through 
this  world  without  feeling  the  vanity  of  all  human  ambitions ; 
their  faith  may  fail  them  here,  but  it  will  not  fail  them — not 

360 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     361 

for  a  moment,  never — if  they  possess  it  as  regards  posthu- 
mous respect  and  affection.  The  world  may  prove  hollow  but 
a  well-earned  good  fame  in  death  will  never  do  so.  And  all 
men  feel  this  whether  they  admit  it  to  themselves  or  no. 

Faith  in  this  is  easy  enough.  We  are  born  with  it.  What 
is  less  easy  is  to  possess  one's  soul  in  peace  and  not  be  shaken 
in  faith  and  broken  in  spirit  on  seeing  the  way  in  which  men 
crowd  themselves,  or  are  crowded,  into  honourable  remem- 
brance when,  if  the  truth  concerning  them  were  known,  no  pit 
of  oblivion  should  be  deep  enough  for  them.  See,  again,  how 
many  who  have  richly  earned  esteem  never  get  it  either  before 
or  after  death.  It  is  here  that  faith  comes  in.  To  see  that 
the  infinite  corruptions  of  this  life  penetrate  into  and  infect 
that  which  is  to  come,  and  yet  to  hold  that  even  infamy 
after  death,  with  obscure  and  penurious  life  before  it,  is  a 
prize  which  will  bring  a  man  more  peace  at  the  last  than  all 
the  good  things  of  this  life  put  together  and  joined  with  an 
immortality  as  lasting  as  Virgil's,  provided  the  infamy  and 
failure  of  the  one  be  unmerited,  as  also  the  success  and  im- 
mortality of  the  other.  Here  is  the  test  of  faith — will  you  do 
your  duty  with  all  your  might  at  any  cost  of  goods  or  reputa- 
tion either  in  this  world  or  beyond  the  grave?  If  you  will — 
well,  the  chances  are  100  to  i  that  you  will  become  a  faddist, 
a  vegetarian  and  a  teetotaller. 

And  suppose  you  escape  this  pit-fall  too.  Why  should  you 
try  to  be  so  much  better  than  your  neighbours  ?  Who  are  you 
to  think  you  may  be  worthy  of  so  much  good  fortune?  If 
you  do,  you  may  be  sure  that  you  do  not  deserve  it.  ... 

And  so  on  ad  infinitum.  Let  us  eat  and  drink  neither  for- 
getting nor  remembering  death  unduly.  The  Lord  hath  mercy 
on  whom  he  will  have  mercy  and  the  less  we  think  about  it 
the  better. 

Starting  again  ad  Infinitum 

A  man  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave  is  but  the  embryo  of 
a  being  that  may  be  born  into  the  world  of  the  dead  who  still 
live,  or  that  may  die  so  soon  after  entering  it  as  to  be  prac- 
tically still-born.  The  greater  number  of  the  seeds  shed, 
whether  by  plants  or  animals,  never  germinate  and  of  those 
that  grow  few  reach  maturity,  so  the  greater  number  of  those 
that  reach  death  are  still-born  as  regards  the  truest  life  of 


362     The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

all — I  mean  the  life  that  is  lived  after  death  in  the  thoughts 
and  actions  of  posterity.  Moreover  of  those  who  are  born 
into  and  fill  great  places  in  this  invisible  world  not  one  is  im- 
mortal. 

We  should  look  on  the  body  as  the  manifesto  of  the  mind 
and  on  posterity  as  the  manifesto  of  the  dead  that  live  after 
life.  Each  is  the  mechanism  whereby  the  other  exists. 

Life,  then,  is  not  the  having  been  born — it  is  rather  an 
effort  to  be  born.  But  why  should  some  succeed  in  attaining 
to  this  future  life  and  others  fail  ?  Why  should  some  be  born 
more  than  others  ?  Why  should  not  some  one  in  a  future  state 
taunt  Lazarus  with  having  a  good  time  now  and  tell  him  it 
will  be  the  turn  of  Dives  in  some  other  and  more  remote 
hereafter  ?  I  must  have  it  that  neither  are  the  good  rewarded 
nor  the  bad  punished  in  a  future  state,  but  every  one  must 
start  anew  quite  irrespective  of  anything  they  have  done 
here  and  must  try  his  luck  again  and  go  on  trying  it  again 
and  again  ad  infinitum.  Some  of  our  lives,  then,  will  be  lucky 
and  some  unlucky  and  it  will  resolve  itself  into  one  long 
eternal  life  during  which  we  shall  change  so  much  that  we 
shall  not  remember  our  antecedents  very  far  back  (any  more 
than  we  remember  having  been  embryos)  nor  foresee  our 
future  very  much,  and  during  which  we  shall  have  our  ups 
and  downs  ad  infinitum — effecting  a  transformation  scene  at 
once  as  soon  as  circumstances  become  unbearable. 

Nevertheless,  some  men's  work  does  live  longer  than 
others.  Some  achieve  what  is  very  like  immortality.  Why 
should  they  have  this  piece  of  good  fortune  more  than  others  ? 
The  answer  is  that  it  would  be  very  unjust  if  they  knew  any- 
thing about  it,  or  could  enjoy  it  in  any  way,  but  they  know 
nothing  whatever  about  it,  and  you,  the  complainer,  do  profit 
by  their  labour,  so  that  it  is  really  you,  the  complainer,  who 
gets  the  fun,  not  they,  and  this  should  stop  your  mouth.  The 
only  thing  they  got  was  a  little  hope,  which  buoyed  them  up 
often  when  there  was  but  little  else  that  could  do  so. 

Preparation  for  Death 

That  there  is  a  life  after  death  is  as  palpable  as  that  there 
is  a  life  before  death — see  the  influence  that  the  dead  have 
over  us — but  this  life  is  no  more  eternal  than  our  present  life. 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     363 

Shakespeare  and  Homer  may  live  long,  but  they  will  die  some 
day,  that  is  to  say,  they  will  become  unknown  as  direct  and 
efficient  causes.  Even  so  God  himself  dies,  for  to  die  is  to 
change  and  to  change  is  to  die  to  what  has  gone  before.  If 
the  units  change  the  total  must  do  so  also. 

As  no  one  can  say  which  egg  or  seed  shall  come  to  visible 
life  and  in  its  turn  leave  issue,  so  no  one  can  say  which  of 
the  millions  of  now  visible  lives  shall  enter  into  the  after- 
life on  death,  and  which  have  but  so  little  life  as  practically 
not  to  count.  For  most  seeds  end  as  seeds  or  as  food  for 
some  alien  being,  and  so  with  lives,  by  far  the  greater  number 
are  sterile,  except  in  so  far  as  they  can  be  devoured  as  the 
food  of  some  stronger  life.  The  Handels  and  Shakespeares 
are  the  few  seeds  that  grow — and  even  these  die. 

And  the  same  uncertainty  attaches  to  posthumous  life  as 
to  pre-lethal.  As  no  one  can  say  how  long  another  shall  live, 
so  no  one  can  say  how  long  or  how  short  a  time  a  reputation 
shall  live.  The  most  unpromising  weakly-looking  creatures 
sometimes  live  to  ninety  while  strong  robust  men  are  carried 
off  in  their  prime.  And  no  one  can  say  what  a  man  shall 
enter  into  life  for  having  done.  Roughly,  there  is  a  sort  of 
moral  government  whereby  those  who  have  done  the  best 
work  live  most  enduringly,  but  it  is  subject  to  such  exceptions 
that  no  one  can  say  whether  or  no  there  shall  not  be  an  excep- 
tion in  his  own  case  either  in  his  favour  or  against  him. 

In  this  uncertainty  a  young  writer  had  better  act  as  though 
he  had  a  reasonable  chance  of  living,  not  perhaps  very  long, 
but  still  some  little  while  after  his  death.  Let  him  leave 
his  notes  fairly  full  and  fairly  tidy  in  all  respects,  without 
spending  too  much  time  about  them.  If  they  are  wanted, 
there  they  are;  if  not  wanted,  there  is  no  harm  done.  He 
might  as  well  leave  them  as  anything  else.  But  let  him  write 
them  in  copying  ink  and  have  the  copies  kept  in  different 
places. 

The  Vates  Sacer 

Just  as  the  kingdom  of  heaven  cometh  not  by  observation, 
so  neither  do  one's  own  ideas,  nor  the  good  things  one  hears 
other  people  say;  they  fasten  on  us  when  we  least  want  or 
expect  them.  It  is  enough  if  the  kingdom  of  heaven  be 
observed  when  it  does  come. 


364    The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

I  do  not  read  much ;  I  look,  listen,  think  and  write.  My 
most  intimate  friends  are  men  of  more  insight,  quicker  wit, 
more  playful  fancy  and,  in  all  ways,  abler  men  than  I  am, 
but  you  will  find  ten  of  them  for  one  of  me.  I  note  what 
they  say,  think  it  over,  adapt  it  and  give  it  permanent  form. 
They  throw  good  things  off  as  sparks;  I  collect  them  and 
turn  them  into  warmth.  But  I  could  not  do  this  if  I  did  not 
sometimes  throw  out  a  spark  or  two  myself. 

Not  only  would  Agamemnon  be  nothing  without  the  vates 
sacer  but  there  are  always  at  least  ten  good  heroes  to  one 
good  chronicler,  just  as  there  are  ten  good  authors  to  one 
good  publisher.  Bravery,  wit  and  poetry  abound  in  every  vil- 
lage. Look  at  Mrs.  Boss  [the  original  of  Mrs.  Jupp  in  The 
Way  of  All  Flesh]  and  at  Joanna  Mills  [Life  and  Letters  of 
Dr.  Butler,  I,  93].  There  is  not  a  village  of  500  inhabitants 
in  England  but  has  its  Mrs.  Quickly  and  its  Tom  Jones. 
These  good  people  never  understand  themselves,  they  go  over 
their  own  heads,  they  speak  in  unknown  tongues  to  those 
around  them  and  the  interpreter  is  the  rare  and  more  impor- 
tant person.  The  vates  sacer  is  the  middleman  of  mind. 

So  rare  is  he  and  such  spendthrifts  are  we  of  good  things 
that  people  not  only  will  not  note  what  might  well  be  noted 
but  they  will  not  even  keep  what  others  have  noted,  if  they 
are  to  be  at  the  pains  of  pigeon-holing  it.  It  is  less  trouble 
to  throw  a  brilliant  letter  into  the  fire  than  to  put  it  into 
such  form  that  it  can  be  safely  kept,  quickly  found  and  easily 
read.  To  this  end  a  letter  should  be  gummed,  with  the  help 
of  the  edgings  of  stamps  if  necessary,  to  a  strip,  say  an  inch 
and  a  quarter  wide,  of  stout  hand-made  paper.  Two  or  three 
paper  fasteners  passed  through  these  strips  will  bind  fifty  or 
sixty  letters  together,  which,  arranged  in  chronological  order, 
can  be  quickly  found  and  comfortably  read.  But  how  few  will 
be  at  the  small  weekly  trouble  of  clearing  up  their  correspond- 
ence and  leaving  it  in  manageable  shape !  If  we  keep  our  letters 
at  all  we  throw  them  higgledy-piggledy  into  a  box  and  have 
done  with  them ;  let  some  one  else  arrange  them  when  the 
owner  is  dead.  The  some  one  else  comes  and  finds  the  fire 
an  easy  method  of  escaping  the  onus  thrown  upon  him.  So 
on  go  letters  from  Tilbrook,  Merian,  Marmaduke  Lawson  * 

*  There  are  letters  from  these  people  in  The  Life  and  Letters  of 
Dr.  Samuel  Butler. 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     365 

—just  as  we  throw  our  money  away  if  the  holding  on  to  it 
involves  even  very  moderate  exertion. 

On  the  other  hand,  if  this  instinct  towards  prodigality 
were  not  so  great,  beauty  and  wit  would  be  smothered  under 
their  own  selves.  It  is  through  the  waste  of  wit  that  wit 
endures,  like  money,  its  main  preciousness  lies  in  its  rarity — 
the  more  plentiful  it  is  the  cheaper  does  it  become. 

The  Dictionary  of  National  Biography 

When  I  look  at  the  articles  on  Handel,  on  Dr.  Arnold,  or 
indeed  on  almost  any  one  whom  I  know  anything  about,  I  feel 
that  such  a  work  as  the  Dictionary  of  National  Biography  adds 
more  terror  to  death  than  death  of  itself  could  inspire.  That 
is  one  reason  why  I  let  myself  go  so  unreservedly  in  these 
notes.  If  the  colours  in  which  I  paint  myself  fail  to  please, 
at  any  rate  I  shall  have  had  the  laying  them  on  myself. 

The  World 

The  world  will,  in  the  end,  follow  only  those  who  have 
despised  as  well  as  served  it. 

Accumulated  Dinners 

The  world  and  all  that  has  ever  been  in  it  will  one  day 
be  as  much  forgotten  as  what  we  ate  for  dinner  forty  years 
ago.  Very  likely,  but  the  fact  that  we  shall  not  remember 
much  about  a  dinner  forty  years  hence  does  not  make  it  less 
agreeable  now,  and  after  all  it  is  only  the  accumulation  of 
these  forgotten  dinners  that  makes  the  dinner  of  forty  years 
hence  possible. 

Judging  the  Dead 

The  dead  should  be  judged  as  we  judge  criminals,  impar- 
tially, but  they  should  be  allowed  the  benefit  of  a  doubt. 
When  no  doubt  exists  they  should  be  hanged  out  of  hand  for 
about  a  hundred  years.  After  that  time  they  may  come  down 
and  move  about  under  a  cloud.  After  about  2000  years  they 
may  do  what  they  like.  If  Nero  murdered  his  mother — well, 
he  murdered  his  mother  and  there's  an  end.  The  moral 


366    TKe  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

guilt  of  an  action  varies  inversely  as  the  squares  of  its  dis- 
tances in  time  and  space,  social,  psychological,  physiological 
or  topographical,  from  ourselves.  Not  so  its  moral  merit: 
this  loses  no  lustre  through  time  and  distance. 

Good  is  like  gold,  it  will  not  rust  or  tarnish  and  it  is  rare, 
but  there  is  some  of  it  everywhere.  Evil  is  like  water,  it 
abounds,  is  cheap,  soon  fouls,  but  runs  itself  clear  of  taint 

Myself  and  My  Books 

Bodily  offspring  I  do  not  leave,  but  mental  offspring  I 
do.  Well,  my  books  do  not  have  to  be  sent  to  school  and 
college  and  then  insist  on  going  into  the  Church  or  take  to 
drinking  or  marry  their  mother's  maid. 

My  Son 

I  have  often  told  my  son  that  he  must  begin  by  finding 
me  a  wife  to  become  his  mother  who  shall  satisfy  both  him- 
self and  me.  But  this  is  only  one  of  the  many  rocks  on  which 
we  have  hitherto  split.  We  should  never  have  got  on  to- 
gether ;  I  should  have  had  to  cut  him  off  with  a  shilling  either 
for  laughing  at  Homer,  or  for  refusing  to  laugh  at  him,  or 
both,  or  neither,  but  still  cut  him  off.  So  I  settled  the  matter 
long  ago  by  turning  a  deaf  ear  to  his  importunities  and  stick- 
ing to  it  that  I  would  not  get  him  at  all.  Yet  his  thin  ghost 
visits  me  at  times  and,  though  he  knows  that  it  is  no  use 
pestering  me  further,  he  looks  at  me  so  wistfully  and  re- 
proachfully that  I  am  half-inclined  to  turn  tail,  take  my 
chance  about  his  mother  and  ask  him  to  let  me  get  him  after 
all.  But  I  should  show  a  clean  pair  of  heels  if  he  said  "Yes." 

Besides,  he  would  probably  be  a  girl. 

Obscurity 

When  I  am  dead,  do  not  let  people  say  of  me  that  I  suffered 
from  misrepresentation  and  neglect.  I  was  neglected  and 
misrepresented;  very  likely  not  half  as  much  as  I  supposed 
but,  nevertheless,  to  some  extent  neglected  and  misrepre- 
sented. I  growl  at  this  sometimes  but,  if  the  question  were 
seriously  put  to  me  whether  I  would  go  on  as  I  am  or  become 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     367 

famous  in  my  own  lifetime,  I  have  no  hesitation  about  which 
I  should  prefer.  I  will  willingly  pay  the  few  hundreds  of 
pounds  which  the  neglect  of  my  works  costs  me  in  order  to 
be  let  alone  and  not  plagued  by  the  people  who  would  come 
round  me  if  I  were  known.  The  probability  is  that  I  shall 
remain  after  my  death  as  obscure  as  I  am  now ;  if  this  be  so, 
the  obscurity  will,  no  doubt,  be  merited,  and  if  not,  my  books 
will  work  not  only  as  well  without  my  having  been  known  in 
my  lifetime  but  a  great  deal  better ;  my  follies  and  blunders 
will  the  better  escape  notice  to  the  enhancing  of  the  value  of 
anything  that  may  be  found  in  my  books.  The  only  two 
things  I  should  greatly  care  about  if  I  had  more  money  are 
a  few  more  country  outings  and  a  little  more  varied  and  bet- 
ter cooked  food.  [1882.] 

P.S. — I  have  long  since  obtained  everything  that  a  reason- 
able man  can  wish  for.  [1895.] 

Posthumous  Honours 

I  see  Cecil  Rhodes  has  just  been  saying  that  he  was  a 
lucky  man,  inasmuch  as  such  honours  as  are  now  being  paid 
him  generally  come  to  a  man  after  his  death  and  not  before 
it.  This  is  all  very  well  for  a  politician  whose  profession  im- 
merses him  in  public  life,  but  the  older  I  grow  the  more  satis- 
fied I  am  that  there  can  be  no  greater  misfortune  for  a  man 
of  letters  or  of  contemplation  than  to  be  recognised  in  his 
own  lifetime.  Fortunately  the  greater  man  he  is,  and  hence 
the  greater  the  misfortune  he  would  incur,  the  less  likelihood 
there  is  that  he  will  incur  it.  [1897.] 

Posthumous  Recognition 

Shall  I  be  remembered  after  death?  I  sometimes  think 
and  hope  so.  But  I  trust  I  may  not  be  found  out  (if  I  ever 
am  found  out,  and  if  I  ought  to  be  found  out  at  all)  before 
my  death.  It  would  bother  me  very  much  and  I  should  be 
much  happier  and  better  as  I  am.  [1880.] 

P.S.— This  note  I  leave  unaltered.  I  am  glad  to  see  that 
I  had  so  much  sense  thirteen  years  ago.  What  I  thought 
then,  I  think  now,  only  with  greater  confidence  and  confirma- 
tion. [1893.] 


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The  Fair  Haven 
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Life  and  Letters  of  Dr. 

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The  Iliad  in  English  Pi 
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A  Book  of  Essays  . 

368 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     369 

To  this  must  be  added  my  book  on  the  Sonnets  in  respect 
of  which  I  have  had  no  account  as  yet  but  am  over  a  hun- 
dred pounds  out  of  pocket  by  it  so  far — little  of  which,  I  fear, 
is  ever  likely  to  come  back. 

It  will  be  noted  that  my  public  appears  to  be  a  declining 
one;  I  attribute  this  to  the  long  course  of  practical  boycott 
to  which  I  have  been  subjected  for  so  many  years,  or,  if  not 
boycott,  of  sneer,  snarl  and  misrepresentation.  I  cannot  help 
it,  nor  if  the  truth  were  known,  am  I  at  any  pains  to  try  to 
do  so.* 

Worth  Doing 

If  I  deserve  to  be  remembered,  it  will  be  not  so  much  for 
anything  I  have  written,  or  for  any  new  way  of  looking  at 
old  facts  which  I  may  have  suggested,  as  for  having  shown 
that  a  man  of  no  special  ability,  with  no  literary  connections, 
not  particularly  laborious,  fairly,  but  not  supremely,  accurate 
as  far  as  he  goes,  and  not  travelling  far  either  for  his  facts  or 
from  them,  may  yet,  by  being  perfectly  square,  sticking  to 
his  point,  not  letting  his  temper  run  away  with  him,  and 
biding  his  time,  be  a  match  for  the  most  powerful  literary 
and  scientific  coterie  that  England  has  ever  known. 

I  hope  it  may  be  said  of  me  that  I  discomfited  an  unscru- 
pulous, self-seeking  clique,  and  set  a  more  wholesome  exam- 
ple myself.  To  have  done  this  is  the  best  of  all  discoveries. 

Doubt  and  Hope 

I  will  not  say  that  the  more  than  coldness  with  which  my 
books  are  received  does  not  frighten  me  and  make  me  distrust 
myself.  It  must  do  so.  But  every  now  and  then  I  meet  with 

*  Butler  made  this  note  in  1899  before  the  publication  of  Shake- 
speare's Sonnets  Reconsidered,  which  was  published  in  the  same  year. 
The  Odyssey  Rendered  into  English  Prose  appeared  in  1900  and 
Erewhon  Revisited,  the  last  book  published  in  his  lifetime,  in  1901. 
He  made  no  analysis  of  the  sales  of  these  three  books,  nor  of  the 
sales  of  A  First  Year  in  Canterbury  Settlement  published  in  1863,  nor 
of  his  pamphlet  The  Evidence  for  the  Resurrection,  published  in  1865. 
The  Way  of  all  Flesh  and  Essays  on  Life,  Art,  and  Science  were  not 
published  till  after  his  death.  I  do  not  know  what  he  means  by  A 
Book  of  Essays,  unless  it  may  be  that  he  incurred  an  outlay  of  £3  us. 
9d.  in  connection  with  a  projected  republication  of  his  articles  in  the 
Universal  Review  or  of  some  of  his  Italian  articles  about  the  Odyssey. 


37°     The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

such  support  as  gives  me  hope  again.    Still,  I  know  nothing. 
[1890.] 

Unburying  Cities 

Of  course  I  am  jealous  of  the  eclat  that  Flinders  Petrie, 
Layard  and  Schliemann  get  for  having  unburied  cities,  but 
I  do  not  see  why  I  need  be ;  the  great  thing  is  to  unbury  the 
city,  and  I  believe  I  have  unburied  Scheria  as  effectually  as 
Schliemann  unburied  Troy.  [The  Authoress  of  the  Odys- 
sey.] True,  Scheria  was  above  ground  all  the  time  and  only 
wanted  a  little  common  sense  to  find  it;  nevertheless  people 
have  had  all  the  facts  before  them  for  over  2500  years  and 
have  been  looking  more  or  less  all  the  time  without  finding.  I 
do  not  see  why  it  is  more  meritorious  to  uncover  physically 
with  a  spade  than  spiritually  with  a  little  of  the  very  com- 
monest common  sense. 

Apologia 

i 

When  I  am  dead  I  would  rather  people  thought  me  better 
than  I  was  instead  of  worse;  but  if  they  think  me  worse,  I 
cannot  help  it  and,  if  it  matters  at  all,  it  will  matter  more  to 
them  than  to  me.  The  one  reputation  I  deprecate  is  that  of 
having  been  ill-used.  I  deprecate  this  because  it  would  tend 
to  depress  and  discourage  others  from  playing  the  game  that 
I  have  played.  I  will  therefore  forestall  misconception  on 
this  head. 

As  regards  general  good-fortune,  I  am  nearly  fifty-five 
years  old  and  for  the  last  thirty  years  have  never  been  laid 
up  with  illness  nor  had  any  physical  pain  that  I  can  remem- 
ber, not  even  toothache.  Except  sometimes,  when  a  little 
over-driven,  I  have  had  uninterrupted  good  health  ever  since 
I  .was  about  five-and-twenty. 

Of  mental  suffering  I  have  had  my  share — as  who  has  not? 
— but  most  of  what  I  have  suffered  has  been,  though  I  did 
not  think  so  at  the  time,  either  imaginary,  or  unnecessary  and, 
so  far,  it  has  been  soon  forgotten.  It  has  been  much  less  than 
it  very  easily  might  have  been  if  the  luck  had  not  now  and 
again  gone  with  me,  and  probably  I  have  suffered  less  than 
most  people,  take  it  all  round.  Like  every  one  else,  however, 
I  have  the  scars  of  old  wounds ;  very  few  of  these  wounds 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     37 l 

were  caused  by  anything  which  was  essential  in  the  nature  of 
things;  most,  if  not  all  of  them,  have  been  due  to  faults  of 
heart  and  head  on  my  own  part  and  on  that  of  others  which, 
one  would  have  thought,  might  have  been  easily  avoided  if 
in  practice  it  had  not  turned  out  otherwise. 

For  many  years  I  was  in  a  good  deal  of  money  difficulty, 
but  since  my  father's  death  I  have  had  no  trouble  on  this 
score — greatly  otherwise.  Even  when  things  were  at  their 
worst,  I  never  missed  my  two  months'  summer  Italian  trip 
since  1876,  except  one  year  and  then  I  went  to  Mont  St. 
Michel  and  enjoyed  it  very  much.  It  was  those  Italian 
trips  that  enabled  me  to  weather  the  storm.  At  other  times 
I  am  engrossed  with  work  that  fascinates  me.  I  am  sur- 
rounded by  people  to  whom  I  am  attached  and  who  like  me  in 
return  so  far  as  I  can  judge.  In  Alfred  [his  clerk  and  attend- 
dant]  I  have  the  best  body-guard  and  the  most  engaging  of 
any  man  in  London.  I  live  quietly  but  happily.  And  if  this  is 
being  ill-used  I  should  like  to  know  what  being  well-used  is. 

I  do  not  deny,  however,  that  I  have  been  ill-used.  I  have 
been  used  abominably.  The  positive  amount  of  good  or  ill 
fortune,  however,  is  not  the  test  of  either  the  one  or  the 
other ;  the  true  measure  lies  in  the  relative  proportion  of  each 
and  the  way  in  which  they  have  been  distributed,  and  by  this 
I  claim,  after  deducting  all  bad  luck,  to  be  left  with  a  large 
balance  of  good. 

Some  people  think  I  must  be  depressed  and  discouraged 
because  my  books  do  not  make  more  noise;  but,  after  all, 
whether  people  read  my  books  or  no  is  their  affair,  not  mine. 
I  know  by  my  sales  that  few  read  my  books.  If  I  write  at  all, 
it  follows  that  I  want  to  be  read  and  miss  my  mark  if  I  am 
not.  So  also  with  Narcissus.  Whatever  I  do  falls  dead,  and 
I  would  rather  people  let  me  see  that  they  liked  it.  To  this 
extent  I  certainly  am  disappointed.  I  am  sorry  not  to  have 
wooed  the  public  more  successfully.  But  I  have  been  told 
that  winning  and  wearing  generally  take  something  of  the 
gilt  off  the  wooing,  and  I  am  disposed  to  acquiesce  cheerfully 
in  not  finding  myself  so  received  as  that  I  need  woo  no  longer. 
If  I  were  to  succeed  I  should  be  bored  to  death  by  my  success 
in  a  fortnight  and  so,  I  am  convinced,  would  my  friends.  Re- 
tirement is  to  me  a  condition  of  being  able  to  work  at  all.  I 
would  rather  write  more  books  and  music  than  spend  much 


372     The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

time  over  what  I  have  already  written;  nor  do  I  see  how  I 
could  get  retirement  if  I  were  not  to  a  certain  extent  unpopular. 
It  is  this  feeling  on  my  own  part — omnipresent  with  me 
when  I  am  doing  my  best  to  please,  that  is  to  say,  whenever 
I  write — which  is  the  cause  why  I  do  not,  as  people  say,  "get 
on."  If  I  had  greatly  cared  about  getting  on  I  think  I  could 
have  done  so.  I  think  I  could  even  now  write  an  anonymous 
book  that  would  take  the  public  as  much  as  Erewhon  did. 
Perhaps  I  could  not,  but  I  think  I  could.  The  reason  why  I 
do  not  try  is  because  I  like  doing  other  things  better.  What 
I  most  enjoy  is  running  the  view  of  evolution  set  forth  in  Life 
and  Habit  and  making  things  less  easy  for  the  hacks  of  litera- 
ture and  science ;  or  perhaps  even  more  I  enjoy  taking  snap- 
shots and  writing  music,  though  aware  that  I  had  better  not 
enquire  whether  this  last  is  any  good  or  not.  In  fact  there  is 
nothing  I  do  that  I  do  not  enjoy  so  keenly  that  I  cannot  tear 
myself  away  from  it,  and  people  who  thus  indulge  themselves 
cannot  have  things  both  ways.  I  am  so  intent  upon  pleasing 
myself  that  I  have  no  time  to  cater  for  the  public.  Some  of 
them  like  things  in  the  same  way  as  I  do;  that  class  of 
people  I  try  to  please  as  well  as  ever  I  can.  With  others  I 
have  no  concern,  and  they  know  it  so  they  have  no  concern 
with  me.  I  do  not  believe  there  is  any  other  explanation  of 
my  failure  to  get  on  than  this,  nor  do  I  see  that  any  further 
explanation  is  needed.  [1890.] 

ii 

Two  or  three  people  have  asked  me  to  return  to  the  subject 
of  my  supposed  failure  and  explain  it  more  fully  from  my 
own  point  of  view.  I  have  had  the  subject  on  my  notes  for 
some  time  and  it  has  bored  me  so  much  that  it  has  had  a  good 
deal  to  do  with  my  not  having  kept  my  Note-Books  posted 
recently. 

Briefly,  in  order  to  scotch  that  snake,  my  failure  has  not 
been  so  great  as  people  say  it  has.  I  believe  my  reputation 
stands  well  with  the  best  people.  Granted  that  it  makes  no 
noise,  but  I  have  not  been  willing  to  take  the  pains  necessary 
to  achieve  what  may  be  called  guinea-pig  review  success,  be- 
cause, although  I  have  been  in  financial  difficulties,  I  did  not 
seriously  need  success  from  a  money  point  of  view,  and  be- 
cause I  hated  the  kind  of  people  I  should  have  had  to  court 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     373 

and  kow-tow  to  if  I  went  in  for  that  sort  of  thing.  I  could 
never  have  carried  it  through,  even  if  I  had  tried,  and  in- 
stinctively declined  to  try.  A  man  cannot  be  said  to  have 
failed,  because  he  did  not  get  what  he  did  not  try  for.  What 
I  did  try  for  I  believe  I  have  got  as  fully  as  any  reasonable 
man  can  expect,  and  I  have  every  hope  that  I  shall  get  it 
still  more  both  so  long  as  I  live  and  after  I  am  dead. 

If,  however,  people  mean  that  I  am  to  explain  how  it  is  I 
have  not  made  more  noise  in  spite  of  my  own  indolence  in 
the  matter,  the  answer  is  that  those  who  do  not  either  push 
themselves  into  noise,  or  give  some  one  else  a  substantial  in- 
terest in  pushing  them,  never  do  get  made  a  noise  about. 
How  can  they?  I  was  too  lazy  to  go  about  from  publisher 
to  publisher  and  to  decline  to  publish  a  book  myself  if  I 
could  not  find  some  one  to  speculate  in  it.  I  could  take  any 
amount  of  trouble  about  writing  a  book  but,  so  long  as  I 
could  lay  my  hand  on  the  money  to  bring  it  out  with,  I  found 
publishers'  antechambers  so  little  to  my  taste  that  I  soon 
tired  and  fell  back  on  the  short  and  easy  method  of  publish- 
ing my  book  myself.  Of  course,  therefore,  it  failed  to  sell. 
I  know  more  about  these  things  now,  and  will  never  publish 
a  book  at  my  own  risk  again,  or  at  any  rate  I  will  send  some- 
body else  round  the  antechambers  with  it  for  a  good  while 
before  I  pay  for  publishing  it. 

I  should  have  liked  notoriety  and  financial  success  well 
enough  if  they  could  have  been  had  for  the  asking,  but  I  was 
not  going  to  take  any  trouble  about  them  and,  as  a  natural 
consequence,  I  did  not  get  them.  If  I  had  wanted  them  with 
the  same  passionate  longing  that  has  led  me  to  pursue  every 
enquiry  that  I  ever  have  pursued,  I  should  have  got  them 
fast  enough.  It  is  very  rarely  that  I  have  failed  to  get  what 
I  have  really  tried  for  and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  I  believe  I 
have  been  a  great  deal  happier  for  not  trying  than  I  should 
have  been  if  I  had  had  notoriety  thrust  upon  me. 

I  confess  I  should  like  my  books  to  pay  their  expenses  and 
put  me  a  little  in  pocket  besides — because  I  want  to  do  more 
for  Alfred  than  I  see  my  way  to  doing.  As  a  natural  conse- 
quence of  beginning  to  care  I  have  begun  to  take  pains,  and 
am  advising  with  the  Society  of  Authors  as  to  what  will 
be  my  best  course.  Very  likely  they  can  do  nothing  for  me, 
but  at  any  rate  I  shall  have  tried. 


374    The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

One  reason,  and  that  the  chief,  why  I  have  made  no  noise, 
is  now  explained.  It  remains  to  add  that  from  first  to  last 
I  have  been  unorthodox  and  militant  in  every  book  that  I 
have  written.  I  made  enemies  of  the  parsons  once  for  all 
with  my  first  two  books.  [Erewhon  and  The  Fair  Haven.] 
The  evolution  books  made  the  Darwinians,  and  through  them 
the  scientific  world  in  general,  even  more  angry  than  The 
Fair  Haven  had  made  the  clergy  so  that  I  had  no  friends, 
for  the  clerical  and  scientific  people  rule  the  roast  between 
them. 

I  have  chosen  the  fighting  road  rather  than  the  hang-on-to- 
a-great-man  road,  and  what  can  a  man  who  does  this  look  for 
except  that  people  should  try  to  silence  him  in  whatever  way 
they  think  will  be  most  effectual?  In  my  case  they  have 
thought  it  best  to  pretend  that  I  am  non-existent.  It  is  no 
part  of  my  business  to  complain  of  my  opponents  for  choos- 
ing their  own  line ;  my  business  is  to  defeat  them  as  best  I  can 
upon  their  own  Jine,  and  I  imagine  I  shall  do  most  towards 
this  by  not  allowing  myself  to  be  made  unhappy  merely 
because  I  am  not  fussed  about,  and  by  going  on  writing  more 
books  and  adding  to  my  pile. 

My  Work 

Why  should  I  write  about  this  as  though  any  one  will  wish 
to  read  what  I  write? 

People  sometimes  give  me  to  understand  that  it  is  a  piece 
of  ridiculous  conceit  on  my  part  to  jot  down  so  many  notes 
about  myself,  since  it  implies  a  confidence  that  I  shall  one 
day  be  regarded  as  an  interesting  person.  I  answer  that 
neither  .1  nor  they  can  form  any  idea  as  to  whether  I  shall  be 
wanted  when  I  am  gone  or  no.  The  chances  are  that  I  shall 
not.  I  am  quite  aware  of  it.  So  the  chances  are  that  I  shall 
not  live  to  be  85 ;  but  I  have  no  right  to  settle  it  so.  If  I  do 
as  Captain  Don  did  [Life  of  Dr.  Butler,  I,  opening  of  Chap- 
ter VIII],  and  invest  every  penny  I  have  in  an  annuity  that 
shall  terminate  when  I  am  89,  who  knows  but  that  I  may 
live  on  to  96,  as  he  did,  and  have  seven  years  without 
any  income  at  all?  I  prefer  the  modest  insurance  of  keep- 
ing up  my  notes  which  others  may  burn  or  no  as  they 
please. 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     375 

I  am  not  one  of  those  who  have  travelled  along  a  set  road 
towards  an  end  that  I  have  foreseen  and  desired  to  reach.  I 
have  made  a  succession  of  jaunts  or  pleasure  trips  from 
meadow  to  meadow,  but  no  long  journey  unless  life  itself  be 
reckoned  so.  Nevertheless,  I  have  strayed  into  no  field  in 
which  I  have  not  found  a  flower  that  was  worth  the  finding, 
I  have  gone  into  no  public  place  in  which  I  have  not  found 
sovereigns  lying  about  on  the  ground  which  people  would  not 
notice  and  be  at  the  trouble  of  picking  up.  They  have  been 
things  which  any  one  else  has  had — or  at  any  rate  a  very 
large  number  of  people  have  had — as  good  a  chance  of  pick- 
ing up  as  I  had.  My  finds  have  none  of  them  come  as  the 
result  of  research  or  severe  study,  though  they  have  generally 
given  me  plenty  to  do  in  the  way  of  research  and  study  as 
soon  as  I  had  got  hold  of  them.  I  take  it  that  these  are  the 
most  interesting — or  whatever  the  least  offensive  word  may 
be: 

1.  The  emphasising  the  analogies  between  crime  and  dis- 
ease.    [Erezvhon.] 

2.  The  emphasising  also  the  analogies  between  the  develop- 
ment of  the  organs  of  our  bodies  and  of  those  which  are  not 
incorporate  with  our  bodies  and  which  we  call  tools  or  ma- 
chines.    [Erewhon  and  Luck  or  Cunning?] 

3.  The  clearing  up  the  history  of  the  events  in  connection 
with  the  death,  or  rather  crucifixion,  of  Jesus  Christ;  and  a 
reasonable  explanation,  first,  of  the  belief  on  the  part  of  the 
founders  of  Christianity  that  their  master  had  risen  from  the 
dead  and,  secondly,  of  what  might  follow  from  belief  in  a 
single  supposed  miracle.    [The  Evidence  for  the  Resurrection 
of  Jesus  Christ,  The  Fair  Haven  and  Erewhon  Revisited.  ] 

4.  The  perception  that  personal  identity  cannot  be  denied 
between  parents  and  offspring  without  at  the  same  time 
denying  it  as  between  the  different  ages   (and  hence  mo- 
ments) in  the  life  of  the  individual  and,  as  a  corollary  on  this, 
the  ascription  of  the  phenomena  of  heredity  to  the  same 
source  as  those  of  memory.     [Life  and  Habit.] 

5.  The  tidying  up  the  earlier  history  of  the  theory  of  evo- 
lution.    [Evolution  Old  and  New.] 

6.  The  exposure  and  discomfiture  of  Charles  Darwin  and 
Wallace  and  their  followers.     [Evolution  Old  and  New,  Un- 
conscious Memory,  Luck  or  Cunning?  and  "The  Deadlock 


376     The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

in    Darwinism"    in    the    Universal   Review   republished    in 
Essays  on  Life,  Art  and  Science.}* 

7.  The  perception  of  the  principle  that  led  organic  life  to 
split  up  into  two  main  divisions,  animal  and  vegetable.     [Alps 
and  Sanctuaries,   close   of    Chapter   XIII :   Luck   or   Cun- 
ning?] 

8.  The  perception  that,  if  the  kinetic  theory  is  held  good, 
our  thought  of  a  thing,  whatever  that  thing  may  be,  is  in 
reality  an   exceedingly   weak   dilution   of   the   actual   thing 
itself.     [Stated,  but  not  fully  developed,  in  Luck  or  Cunning? 
Chapter  XIX,  also  in  some  of  the  foregoing  notes.] 

9.  The  restitution  to  Giovanni  and  Gentile  Bellini  of  their 
portraits  in  the  Louvre  and  the  finding  of  five  other  portraits 
of  these  two  painters  of  whom  Crowe  and  Cavalcaselle  and 
Layard  maintain  that  we  have  no  portrait.     [Letters  to  the 
Athenaum,  &c.] 

10.  The  restoration  to  Holbein  of  the  drawing  in  the  Basel 
Museum  called  La  Danse.    [Universal  Review,  Nov.,  1889.] 

n.  The  calling  attention  to  Gaudenzio  Ferrari  and  putting 
him  before  the  public  with  something  like  the  emphasis  that 
he  deserves.  [Ex  Voto.} 

12.  The  discovery  of  a  life-sized  statue  of  Leonardo  da 
Vinci  by  Gaudenzio  Ferrari.     [Ex  Voto.} 

13.  The  unearthing  of  the  Flemish  sculptor  Jean  de  Wespin 
(called    Tabachetti    in    Italy)    and    of    Giovanni    Antonio 
Paracca.     [Ex  Voto.] 

14.  The   finding   out   that   the   Odyssey   was   written   at 
Trapani,  the  clearing  up  of  the  whole  topography  of  the 
poem,  and  the  demonstration,  as  it  seems  to  me,  that  the  poem 
was  written  by  a  woman  and  not  by  a  man.    Indeed,  I  may 
almost  claim  to  have  discovered  the  Odyssey,  so  altered  does 
it  become  when  my  views  of  it  are  adopted.    And  robbing 
Homer  of  the  Odyssey  has  rendered  the  Iliad  far  more  intelli- 
gible; besides,  I  have  set  the  example  of  how  he  should  be 
approached.     [The  Authoress  of  the  Odyssey.] 

15.  The  attempt  to  do  justice  to  my  grandfather  by  writing 
*  Butler  had  two  separate  grounds   of  complaint  against  Charles 

Darwin,  one  scientific,  the  other  personal.  With  regard  to  the  per- 
sonal quarrel  some  facts  came  to  light  after  Butler's  death  and  the 
subject  is  dealt  with  in  a  pamphlet  entitled  Charles  Darwin  and 
Samuel  Butler:  A  Step  towards  Reconciliation,  by  Henry  Festing 
Jones  (A.  C.  Fifield,  1911). 


The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come     377 

The  Life  and  Letters  of  Dr.  Butler  for  which,  however,  I  had 
special  facilities. 

1 6.  In  Narcissus  and  Ulysses  I  made  an  attempt,  the  fail- 
ure of  which  has  yet  to  be  shown,  to  return  to  the  principles 
of  Handel  and  take  them  up  where  he  left  off. 

17.  The  elucidation  of   Shakespeare's  Sonnets.     [Shake- 
speare's Sonnets  Reconsidered.] 

I  say  nothing  here  about  my  novel  [The  Way  of  All  Flesh] 
because  it  cannot  be  published  till  after  my  death ;  nor  about 
my  translations  of  the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey.  Nevertheless 
these  three  books  also  were  a  kind  of  picking  up  of  sov- 
ereigns, for  the  novel  contains  records  of  things  I  saw  hap- 
pening rather  than  imaginary  incidents,  and  the  principles  on 
which  the  translations  are  made  were  obvious  to  any  one  will- 
ing to  take  and  use  them. 

The  foregoing  is  the  list  of  my  "mares'-nests,"  and  it  is,  I 
presume,  this  list  which  made  Mr.  Arthur  Platt  call  me  the 
Galileo  of  Mares'-Nests  in  his  diatribe  on  my  Odyssey  theory 
in  the  Classical  Review.  I  am  not  going  to  argue  here  that 
they  are  all,  as  I  do  not  doubt,  sound ;  what  I  want  to  say  is 
that  they  are  every  one  of  them  things  that  lay  on  the  surface 
and  open  to  any  one  else  just  as  much  as  to  me.  Not  one  of 
them  required  any  profundity  of  thought  or  extensive  re- 
search ;  they  only  required  that  he  who  approached  the  vari- 
ous subjects  with  which  they  have  to  do  should  keep  his 
eyes  open  and  try  to  put  himself  in  the  position  of  the  vari- 
ous people  whom  they  involve.  Above  all,  it  was  necessary  to 
approach  them  without  any  preconceived  theory  and  to  be 
ready  to  throw  over  any  conclusion  the  moment  the  evidence 
pointed  against  it.  The  reason  why  I  have  discarded  so  few 
theories  that  I  have  put  forward — and  at  this  moment  I 
cannot  recollect  one  from  which  there  has  been  any  serious 
attempt  to  dislodge  me — is  because  I  never  allowed  myself  to 
form  a  theory  at  all  till  I  found  myself  driven  on  to  it  whether 
I  would  or  no.  As  long  as  it  was  possible  to  resist  I  resisted, 
and  only  yielded  when  I  could  not  think  that  an  intelligent 
jury  under  capable  guidance  would  go  with  me  if  I  resisted 
longer.  I  never  went  in  search  of  any  one  of  my  theories ; 
I  never  knew  what  it  was  going  to  be  till  I  had  found  it; 
they  came  and  found  me,  not  I  them.  Such  being  my  own 
experience,  I  begin  to  be  pretty  certain  that  other  people 


378     The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come 

have  had  much  the  same  and  that  the  soundest  theories 
have  come  unsought  and  without  much  effort 

The  conclusion,  then,  of  the  whole  matter  is  that  scientific 
and  literary  fortunes  are,  like  money  fortunes,  made  more  by 
saving  than  in  any  other  way — more  through  the  exercise  of 
the  common  vulgar  essentials,  such  as  sobriety  and  straight- 
forwardness, than  by  the  more  showy  enterprises  that  when 
they  happen  to  succeed  are  called  genius  and  when  they  fail, 
folly.  The  streets  are  full  of  sovereigns  crying  aloud  for 
some  one  to  come  and  pick  them  up,  only  the  thick  veil  of  our 
own  insincerity  and  conceit  hides  them  from  us.  He  who 
can  most  tear  this  veil  from  in  front  of  his  eyes  will  be  able 
to  see  most  and  to  walk  off  with  them. 

I  should  say  that  the  sooner  I  stop  the  better.  If  on  my 
descent  to  the  nether  world  I  were  to  be  met  and  welcomed  by 
the  shades  of  those  to  whom  I  have  done  a  good  turn  while  I 
was  here,  I  should  be  received  by  a  fairly  illustrious  crowd. 
There  would  be  Giovanni  and  Gentile  Bellini,  Leonardo  da 
Vinci,  Gaudenzio  Ferrari,  Holbein,  Tabachetti,  Paracca  and 
D'Enrico ;  the  Authoress  of  the  Odyssey  would  come  and 
Homer  with  her ;  Dr.  Butler  would  bring  with  him  the  many 
forgotten  men  and  women  to  whom  in  my  memoir  I  have 
given  fresh  life;  there  would  be  Buffon,  Erasmus  Darwin 
and  Lamarck ;  Shakespeare  also  would  be  there  and  Handel. 
I  could  not  wish  to  find  myself  in  more  congenial  company 
and  I  shall  not  take  it  too  much  to  heart  if  the  shade  of 
Charles  Darwin  glides  gloomily  away  when  it  sees  me 
coming. 


XXV 

Poems 

Prefatory  Note 

i.  Translation  from  an  Unpublished  Work 

of  Herodotus 

\\.  The  Shield  of  Achilles,  with  Variations 
iii.  The  Two  Deans 
iv.  On  the  Italian  Priesthood 

Butler  wrote  these  four  pieces  while  he  was  an  undergrad- 
uate at  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge.  He  kept  no  copy  of 
any  of  them,  but  his  friend  the  Rev.  Canon  Joseph  McCor- 
mick,  D.D.,  Rector  of  St.  James? s,  Piccadilly,  kept  copies  in 
a  note-book  which  he  lent  me.  The  only  one  that  has  ap- 
peared in  print  is  "The  Shield  of  Achilles,"  which  Canon  Mc- 
Cormick  sent  to  The  Eagle  the  magazine  of  St.  John's  Col- 
lege, Cambridge,  and  it  was  printed  in  the  number  for  De- 
cember 1902,  about  six  months  after  Butler's  death. 

"On  the  Italian  Priesthood"  is  a  rendering  of  the  Italian 
epigram  accompanying  it  which,  with  others  under  the  head- 
ing "Astuzia,  Inganno,"  is  given  in  Raccolta  di  Proverbi  Tos- 
cani  di  Giuseppe  Giusti  (Firenze,  1853). 

v.  A  Psalm  of  Montreal 

This  was  written  in  Canada  in  1875.  Butler  often  recited  it 
and  gave  copies  of  it  to  his  friends.  Knowing  that  Mr.  Ed- 
ward Clodd  had  had  something  to  do  with  its  appearance  in 
the  Spectator  /  wrote  asking  him  to  tell  me  what  he  remem- 
bered about  it.  He  very  kindly  replied,  2gth  October,  1905 : 

"The  'Psalm'  was  recited  to  me  at  the  Century  Club  by 
Butler.  He  gave  me  a  copy  of  it  which  I  read  to  the  late 

379 


380  Poems 

Chas.  Anderson,  Vicar  of  S.  John's,  Limehouse,  who  lent  it 
to  Matt.  Arnold  (when  inspecting  Anderson's  Schools}  who 
lent  it  to  Richd.  Holt  Hutton  who,  with  Butler's  consent, 
printed  it  in  the  Spectator  of  iSth  May,  1878." 

The  "Psalm  of  Montreal"  was  included  in  Selections  from 
Previous  Works  (1884)  and  in  Seven  Sonnets,  etc. 

\\.  The  Righteous  Man 

Butler  wrote  this  in  1876;  it  has  appeared  before  only  in 
1879  in  the  Examiner,  where  it  formed  part  of  the  correspond- 
ence "A  Clergyman's  Doubts"  of  which  the  letter  signed 
"Ethics"  has  already  been  given  in  this  volume  (see  p.  304 
ante).  "The  Righteous  Man"  was  signed  "X.Y.Z."  and,  in 
order  to  connect  it  with  the  discussion,  Butler  prefaced  it  with 
a  note  comparing  it  to  the  last  six  inches  of  a  line  of  railway; 
there  is  no  part  of  the  road  so  ugly,  so  little  travelled  over,  or 
so  useless  generally,  but  it  is  the  end,  at  any  rate,  of  a  very 
long  thing. 

vii.  To  Critics  and  Others 
This  was  written  in  1883  and  has  not  hitherto  been  published. 

viii.  For  Narcissus 

These  are  printed  for  the  first  time.  The  pianoforte  score 
of  Narcissus  was  published  in  1888.  The  poem  (A)  was  writ- 
ten because  there  was  some  discussion  then  going  on  in  musi- 
cal circles  about  additional  accompaniments  to  the  Messiah 
and  we  did  not  want  any  to  be  written  for  Narcissus. 

The  poem  (B)  shows  how  Butler  originally  intended  to 
open  Part  II  with  a  kind  of  descriptive  programme,  but  he 
changed  his  mind  and  did  it  differently. 

ix.  A  Translation  Attempted  in  Consequence 
of  a  Challenge 

This  translation  into  Homeric  verse  of  a  famous  passage 
from  Martin  Chuzzlewit  was  a  by-product  of  Butler's  work 
on  the  Odyssey  and  the  Iliad.  It  was  published  in  The  Eagle 
in  March,  1894,  and  was  included  in  Seven  Sonnets. 

/  asked  Butler  who  had  challenged  him  to  attempt  the  trans- 
lation and  he  replied  that  he  had  thought  of  that  and  had  set- 


Poems  381 

tied  that,  if  any  one  else  were  to  ask  the  question,  he  should 
reply  that  the  challenge  came  from  me. 

x.  In  Memoriam  H.  R.  F. 

This  appears  in  print  now  for  the  first  time.  Hans  Rudolf 
Faesch,  a  young  Swiss  from  Basel,  came  to  London  in  the 
autumn  of  1893.  He  spent  much  of  his  time  with  us  until 
I4th  February,  1895,  when  he  left  for  Singapore.  We  saw 
him  off  from,  H<olborn  Viaduct  Station;  he  was  not  well  and 
it  was  a  stormy  night.  The  next  day  Butler  wrote  this  poem 
and,  being  persuaded  that  we  should  never  see  H\j,ns  Faesch 
again,  called  it  an  In  Memoriam.  Hans  did  not  die  on  the 
journey,  he  arrived  safely  in  Singapore  and  settled  in  the  East 
where  he  carried  on  business.  We  exchanged  letters  with 
him  frequently;  he  paid  two  visits  to  Europe  and  we  saw  him 
on  both  occasions.  But  he  did  not  live  long.  He  died  in  the 
autumn  of  1903  at  Vien  Tiane  in  the  Shan  States,  aged  32, 
having  survived  Butler  by  about  a  year  and  a  half. 

xi.  An  Academic  Exercise 

This  has  never  been  printed  before.  It  is  a  Farewell,  and 
that  is  why  I  have  placed  it  next  after  the  In  Memoriam. 
The  contrast  between  the  two  poems  illustrates  the  contrast 
pointed  out  at  the  close  of  the  note  an  "The  Dislike  of  Death" 
(ante,  p.  359)  : 

"The  memory  of  a  love  that  has  been  cut  short  by  death  re- 
mains still  fragrant  though  enfeebled,  but  no  recollection  of 
its  past  can  keep  sweet  a  love  that  has  dried  up  and  withered 
through  accidents  of  time  and  life." 

In  the  ordinary  course  Butler  would  have  talked  this  Son- 
net over  with  me  at  the  time  he  wrote  it,  that  is  in  January, 
1902 ;  he  may  even  have  done  so,  but  I  think  not.  From  2nd 
January,  1902,  until  late  in  March,  when  he  left  London  alone 
for  Sicily,  I  was  ill  with  pneumonia  and  remember  very  little 
of  what  happened  then.  Between  his  return  in  May  and  his 
death  in  June  I  am  sure  he  did  not  mention  the  subject.  Know- 
ing the  facts  that  underlie  the  preceding  poem  I  can  tell  why 
Butler  called  it  an  In  Memoriam;  not  knowing  the  facts  that 
underlie  this  poem  I  cannot  tell  why  Butler  should  have  called 
it  an  Academic  Exercise.  It  is  his  last  Sonnet  and  is  dated 


382  Poems 

"Sund.  Jan.  I2th  1902,"  within  six  months  of  his  death,  at  a 
time  when  he  was  depressed  physically  because  his  health  was 
failing  and  mentally  because  he  had  been  "editing  his  remains," 
reading  and  destroying  old  letters  and  brooding  over  the  past. 
One  of  the  subjects  given  in  the  section  "Titles  and  Subjects" 
(ante}  is  "The  diseases  and  ordinary  causes  of  mortality  among 
friendships."  /  suppose  that  he  found  among  his  letters  some- 
thing which  awakened  memories  of  a  friendship  of  his  earlier 
life — a  friendship  that -had  suffered  from  a  disease,  whether  it 
recovered  or  died  would  not  affect  the  sincerity  of  the  emotions 
experienced  by  Butler  at  the  time  he  believed  the  friendship  to 
be  virtually  dead.  I  suppose  the  Sonnet  to  be  an  In  Memoriam 
upon  the  apprehended  death  of  a  friendship  as  the  preceding 
poem  is  anlnMemoriamupontheapprehended  death  of  a  friend. 
This  may  be  wrong,  but  something  of  the  kind  seems  neces- 
sary to  explain  why  Butler  should  have  called  the  Sonnet  an 
Academic  Exercise.  No  one  who  has  read  Shakespeare's  Son- 
nets Reconsidered  will  require  to  be  told  that  he  disagreed  con- 
temptuously with  those  critics  who  believe  that  Shakespeare 
composed  his  Sonnets  as  academic  exercises.  It  is  certain  that 
he  wrote  this,  as  he  wrote  his  other  Sonnets,  in  imitation  of 
Shakespeare,  not  merely  imitating  the  form  but  approaching 
the  subject  in  the  spirit  in  which  he  believed  Shakespeare  to 
have  approached  his  subject.  It  follows  therefore  that  he  did 
not  write  this  sonnet  as  an  academic  exercise,  had  he  done  so 
he  would  not  have  been  imitating  Shakespeare.  If  we  assume 
that  he  was  presenting  his  story  as  he  presented  the  dialogue  in 
"A  Psalm  of  Montreal"  in  a  form  "perhaps  true,  perhaps  imag- 
inary, perhaps  a  little  of  the  one  and  a  little  of  the  other"  it 
would  be  quite  in  the  manner  of  the  author  of  The  Fair  Haven 
to  burlesque  the  methods  of  the  critics  by  ignoring  the  sincer- 
ity of  the  emotions  and  fixing  on  the  little  bit  of  inaccuracy  in 
the  facts.  We  may  suppose  him  to  be  saying  out  loud  to  the 
critics:  "You  think  Shakespeare's  Sonnets  were  composed  as 
academic  exercises,  do  you?  Very  well  then,  now  what  do  you 
make  of  this?"  And  adding  aside  to  himself:  "That  will  be 
good  enough  for  them;  they'll  swallow  anything." 

xii.  A  Prayer 

Extract  from  Butler's  Note-Books  under  the  date  of  Febru- 
ary or  March  1883 : 


Poems  383 

"  'Cleanse  thou  me  from  my  secret  sins.'  I  heard  a  man 
moralising  on  this  and  shocked  him  by  saying  demurely  that  I 
did  not  mind  these  so  much,  if  I  could  get  rid  of  those  that 
were  obvious  to  other  people." 

He  wrote  the  sonnet  in  1900  or  1901.  In  the  first  quatrain 
"spoken"  does  not  rhyme  zvith  "open";  Butler  knew  this  and 
would  no-t  alter  it  because  there  are  similar  assonances  in 
Shakespeare,  e.g.  "open"  and  "broken"  in  Sonnet  LXI. 

xiii.  Karma 

I  am  responsible  for  grouping  these  three  sonnets  under  this 
heading.  The  second  one  beginning  "What  is*t  to  live"  ap- 
pears in  Butler's  Note-Book  with  the  remark,  "This  wants 
much  tinkering,  but  I  cannot  tinker  it" — meaning  that  he  was 
too  much  occupied  with  other  things.  He  left  the  second  line 
of  the  third  of  these  sonnets  thus: 

"Them  palpable  to  touch  and  view." 

I  have  "tinkered"  it  by  adding  the  two  syllables  "clear  to" 
to  make  the  line  complete. 

In  writing  this  sonnet  Butler  was  no  doubt  thinking  of  a 
note  he  made  in  1891 : 

"It  is  often  said  that  there  is  no  bore  like  a  clever  bore. 
Clever  people  are  always  bores  and  always  must  be.  That  is, 
perhaps,  why  Shakespeare  had  to  leave  London — people  could 
not  stand  him  any  longer." 

xiv.  The  Life  after  Death 

Butler  began  to  write  sonnets  in  1898  when  he  was  studying 
those  of  Shakespeare  on  which  he  published  a  book  in  the  fol- 
lowing year.  (Shakespeare's  Sonnets  Reconsidered,  &c.)  He 
had  gone  to  Flushing  by  himself  and  on  his  return  wrote  to  me: 

24  Aug.  1898.  "Also  at  Flushing  I  wrote  one  myself,  a  poor 
innocent  thing,  but  I  was  surprised  to  find  how  easily  it  came; 
if  you  like  it  I  may  write  a  few  more." 

The  "poor  innocent  thing"  was  the  sonnet  beginning  "Not 
on  sad  Stygian  shore,"  the  first  of  those  I  have  grouped  under 
the  heading  "The  Life  after  Death."  It  appears  in  his  note- 
books with  this  introductory  sentence: 

"Having  now  learned  Shakespeare's  Sonnets  by  heart — and 


384  Poems 

there  are  very  few  which  I  do  not  find  I  understand  the  better 
for  having  done  this — on  Saturday  night  last  at  the  Hotel  Zee- 
land  at  Flushing,  finding  myself  in  a  meditative  mood,  I  wrote 
the  following  with  a  good  deal  less  trouble  than  I  anticipated 
when  I  took  pen  and  paper  in  hand.  I  hope  I  may  improve  it." 

Of  course  I  like  the  sonnet  very  much  and  he  did  write  "a 
few  more" — among  them  the  two  on  Handel  which  I  have  put 
after  "Not  on  sad  Stygian  shore"  because  he  intended  that  they 
should  follow  it.  I  am  sure  he  would  have  wished  this  volume 
to  close  with  these  three  sonnets,  especially  because  the  last  two 
of  them  were  inspired  by  Handel,  who  was  never  absent  from 
his  thoughts  for  long.  Let  me  conclude  these  introductory 
remarks  by  reproducing  a  note  made  in  1883  : 

"Of  all  dead  men  Handel  has  had  the  largest  place  in  my 
thoughts.  In  fact  I  should  say  that  he  and  his  music  have  been 
the  central  fact  in  my  life  ever  since  I  was  old  enough  to  know 
of  the  existence  of  either  life  or  music.  All  day  long — whether 
I  am  writing  or  painting  or  walking,  but  always — /  have  his 
music  in  my  head;  and  if  I  lose  sight  of  it  and  of  him  for  an 
hour  or  two,  as  of  course  I  sometimes  do,  this  is  as  much  as  I 
do.  I  believe  I  am  not  exaggerating  when  I  say  that  I  have 
never  been  a  day  since  I  was  13  without  having  Handel  in  my 
mind  many  times  over." 


Translation  from  an  Unpublished  Work 
of  Herodotus 

And  the  Johnians  practise  their  tub  in  the  following  man- 
ner:— They  select  8  of  the  most  serviceable  freshmen  and 
put  these  into  a  boat  and  to  each  one  of  them  they  give  an 
oar;  and,  having  told  them  to  look  at  the  backs  of  the  men 
before  them,  they  make  them  bend  forward  as  far  as  they 
can  and  at  the  same  moment,  and,  having  put  the  end  of  the 
oar  into  the  water,  pull  it  back  again  in  to  them  about  the 
bottom  of  the  ribs;  and,  if  any  of  them  does  not  do  this  or 
looks  about  him  away  from  the  back  of  the  man  before  him, 
they  curse  him  in  the  most  terrible  manner,  but  if  he  does 
what  he  is  bidden  they  immediately  cry  out : 

"Well  pulled,  number  so-and-so." 


Poems  385 

For  they  do  not  call  them  by  their  names  but  by  certain 
numbers,  each  man  of  them  having  a  number  allotted  to  him 
in  accordance  with  his  place  in  the  boat,  and  the  first  man 
they  call  stroke,  but  the  last  man  bow ;  and  when  they  have 
done  this  for  about  50  miles  they  come  home  again,  and  the 
rate  they  travel  at  is  about  25  miles  an  hour ;  and  let  no  one 
think  that  this  is  too  great  a  rate  for  I  could  say  many  other 
wonderful  things  in  addition  concerning  the  rowing  of  the 
Johnians,  but  if  a  man  wishes  to  know  these  things  he  must 
go  and  examine  them  himself.  But  when  they  have  done 
they  contrive  some  such  a  device  as  this,  for  they  make  them 
run  many  miles  along  the  side  of  the  river  in  order  that  they 
may  accustom  them  to  great  fatigue,  and  many  of  them, 
being  distressed  in  this  way,  fall  down  and  die,  but  those  who 
survive  become  very  strong  and  receive  gifts  of  cups  from 
the  others ;  and  after  the  revolution  of  a  year  they  have  great 
races  with  their  boats  against  those  of  the  surrounding  island- 
ers, but  the  Johnians,  both  owing  to  the  carefulness  of  the 
training  and  a  natural  disposition  for  rowing,  are  always 
victorious.  In  this  way,  then,  the  Johnians,  I  say,  practise 
their  tub. 

ii 

The  Shield  of  Achilles 
With  Variations 

And  in  it  he  placed  the  Fitzwilliam  and  King's  College 
Chapel  and  the  lofty  towered  church  of  the  Great  Saint  Mary, 
which  looketh  towards  the  Senate  House,  and  King's  Parade 
and  Trumpington  Road  and  the  Pitt  Press  and  the  divine 
opening  of  the  Market  Square  and  the  beautiful  flowing  foun- 
tain which  formerly  Hobson  laboured  to  make  with  skilful 
art;  him  did  his  father  beget  in  the  many-public-housed 
Trumpington  from  a  slavey  mother  and  taught  him  blame- 
less works;  and  he,  on  the  other  hand,  sprang  up  like  a 
young  shoot  and  many  beautifully  matched  horses  did  he 
nourish  in  his  stable,  which  used  to  convey  his  rich  posses- 
sions to  London  and  the  various  cities  of  the  world;  but 
oftentimes  did  he  let  them  out  to  others  and  whensoever 
any  one  was  desirous  of  hiring  one  of  the  long-tailed  horses 
he  took  them  in  order,  so  that  the  labour  was  equal  to  all, 


386  Poems 

wherefore  do  men  now  speak  of  the  choice  of  the  renowned 
Hobson.  And  in  it  he  placed  the  close  of  the  divine  Parker, 
and  many  beautiful  undergraduates  were  delighting  their 
tender  minds  upon  it  playing  cricket  with  one  another;  and 
a  match  was  being  played  and  two  umpires  were  quarrelling 
with  one  another ;  the  one  saying  that  the  batsman  who  was 
playing  was  out  and  the  other  declaring  with  all  his  might 
that  he  was  not ;  and  while  they  two  were  contending,  reviling 
one  another  with  abusive  language,  a  ball  came  and  hit  one 
of  them  on  the  nose  and  the  blood  flowed  out  in  a  stream  and 
darkness  was  covering  his  eyes,  but  the  rest  were  crying  out 
on  all  sides : 

"Shy  it  up." 

And  he  could  not;  him,  then,  was  his  companion  address- 
ing with  scornful  words: 

"Arnold,  why  dost  thou  strive  with  me  since  I  am  much 
wiser?  Did  not  I  see  his  leg  before  the  wicket  and  rightly 
declare  him  to  be  out?  Thee,  then,  has  Zeus  now  punished 
according  to  thy  deserts  and  I  will  seek  some  other  umpire 
of  the  game  equally-participated-in-by-both-sides." 

And  in  it  he  placed  the  Cam  and  many  boats  equally 
rowed  on  both  sides  were  going  up  and  down  on  the  bosom 
of  the  deep  rolling  river  and  the  coxswains  were  cheering  on 
the  men,  for  they  were  going  to  enter  the  contest  of  the 
scratchean  fours;  and  three  men  were  rowing  together  in  a 
boat,  strong  and  stout  and  determined  in  their  hearts  that 
they  would  either  first  break  a  blood  vessel  or  earn  for  them- 
selves the  electroplated-Birmingham-manufactured  magnifi- 
cence of  a  pewter  to  stand  on  their  hall  tables  in  memorial 
of  their  strength,  and  from  time  to  time  drink  from  it  the 
exhilarating  streams  of  beer  whensoever  their  dear  heart 
should  compel  them;  but  the  fouth  was  weak  and  unequally 
matched  with  the  others  and  the  coxswain  was  encour- 
aging him  and  called  him  by  name  and  spake  cheering 
words : 

"Smith,  when  thou  hast  begun  the  contest,  be  not  flurried 
nor  strive  too  hard  against  thy  fate,  look  at  the  back  of  the 
man  before  thee  and  row  with  as  much  strength  as  the  Fates 
spun  out  for  thee  on  the  day  when  thou  fellest  between  the 
knees  of  thy  mother,  neither  lose  thine  oar,  but  hold  it  tight 
with  thy  hands." 


Poems  387 


in 
The  Two  Deans 

Scene:  The  Court  of  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge.    Enter 
the  two  deans  on  their  way  to  morning  chapel. 

JUNIOR  DEAN  :    Brother,  I  am  much  pleased  with  Samuel 

Butler, 

I  have  observed  him  mightily  of  late ; 
Methinks  that  in  his  melancholy  walk 
And  air  subdued  when'er  he  meeteth  me 
Lurks  something  more  than  in  most  other  men. 
SENIOR  DEAN  :    It  is  a  good  young  man.     I  do  bethink  me 
That  once  I  walked  behind  him  in  the  cloister, 
Hie  saw  me  not,  but  whispered  to  his  fellow : 
"Of  all  men  who  do  dwell  beneath  the  moon 
I  love  and  reverence  most  the  senior  Dean." 
JUNIOR  DEAN  :  One  thing  is  passing  strange,  and  yet  I  know 

not 

How  to  condemn  it ;  but  in  one  plain  brief  word 
He  never  conies  to  Sunday  morning  chapel. 
Methinks  he  teacheth  in  some  Sunday  school, 
Feeding  the  poor  and  starveling  intellect 
With  wholesome  knowledge,  or  on  the  Sabbath  morn 
He  loves  the  country  and  the  neighbouring  spire 
Of  Madingley  or  Coton,  or  perchance 
Amid  some  humble  poor  he  spends  the  day 
Conversing  with  them,  learning  all  their  cares, 
Comforting  them  and  easing  them  in  sickness. 
Oh  'tis  a  rare  young  man! 

SENIOR  DEAN  :  I  will  advance  him  to  some  public  post, 
He  shall  be  chapel  clerk,  some  day  a  fellow, 
Some  day  perhaps  a  Dean,  but  as  thou  sayst 
He  is  indeed  an  excellent  young  man — 
Enter  Butler  suddenly  without  a  coat,  or  anything  on  his 
head,  rushing  through  the  cloisters,  bearing  a  cup,  a  bottle  of 
cider,  four  lemons,  two  nutmegs,  half  a  pound  of  sugar  and  a 
nutmeg  grater. 

Curtain  falls  on  the  confusion  of  Butler  and  the  horror- 
stricken  dismay  of  the  two  deans. 


388  Poems 


IV 

On  the  Italian  Priesthood 

(Conarte  e  con  inganno,  si  yive  mezzo  1'anno; 
Con  inganno  e  con  arte,  si  vive  1'altra  parte.) 

In  knavish  art  and  gathering  gear 
They  spend  the  one  half  of  the  year; 
In  gathering  gear  and  knavish  art 
They  somehow  spend  the  other  part. 

v 
A  Psalm  of  Montreal 

The  City  of  Montreal  is  one  of  the  most  rising  and,  in 
many  respects,  most  agreeable  on  the  American  continent, 
but  its  inhabitants  are  as  yet  too  busy  with  commerce  to 
care  greatly  about  the  masterpieces  of  old  Greek  Art.  In  the 
Montreal  Museum  of  Natural  History  I  came  upon  two  plaster 
casts,  one  of  the  Antinous  and  the  other  of  the  Discobolus — 
not  the  good  one,  but  in  my  poem,  of  course,  I  intend  the 
good  one — banished  from  public  view  to  a  room  where  were 
all  manner  of  skins,  plants,  snakes,  insects,  etc.,  and,  in  the 
middle  of  these,  an  old  man  stuffing  an  owl. 

"Ah,"  said  I,  "so  you  have  some  antiques  here ;  why  don't 
you  put  them  where  people  can  see  them  ?" 

"Well,  sir,"  answered  the  custodian,  "you  see  they  are 
rather  vulgar." 

He  then  talked  a  great  deal  and  said  his  brother  did  all 
Mr.  Spurgeon's  printing. 

The  dialogue — perhaps  true,  perhaps  imaginary,  perhaps  a 
little  of  the  one  and  a  little  of  the  other — between  the  writer 
and  this  old  man  gave  rise  to  the  lines  that  follow : 

Stowed  away  in  a  Montreal  lumber  room 
The  Discobolus  standeth  and  turneth  his  face  to  the  wall; 
Dusty,  cobweb-covered,  maimed  and  set  at  naught, 
Beauty  crieth  in  an  attic  and  no  man  regardeth : 

O  God!    O  Montreal! 


Poems  389 

Beautiful  by  night  and  day,  beautiful  in  summer  and  winter, 
Whole  or  maimed,  always  and  alike  beautiful — 
He  preacheth  gospel  of  grace  to  the  skin  of  owls 
And  to  one  who  seasoneth  the  skins  of  Canadian  owls : 

O  God!    O  Montreal! 

When  I  saw  him  I  was  wroth  and  I  said,  "O  Discobolus ! 
Beautiful  Discobolus,  a  Prince  both  among  gods  and  men! 
What  doest  thou  here,  how  earnest  thou  hither,  Discobolus, 
Preaching  gospel  in  vain  to  the  skins  of  owls?" 

O  God!    O  Montreal! 

And  I  turned  to  the  man  of  skins  and  said  unto  him,  "O  thou 

man  of  skins, 
Wherefore  hast  thou  done  thus  to  shame  the  beauty  of  the 

Discobolus  ?" 

But  the  Lord  had  hardened  the  heart  of  the  man  of  skins 
And  he  answered,  "My  brother-in-law  is  haberdasher  to  Mr. 

Spurgeon." 

O  God !    O  Montreal ! 

"The  Discobolus  is  put  here  because  he  is  vulgar — 
He  has  neither  vest  nor  pants  with  which  to  cover  his  limbs ; 
I,  Sir,  am  a  person  of  most  respectable  connections — 
My  brother-in-law  is  haberdasher  to  Mr.  Spurgeon." 

O  God!    O  Montreal! 

Then  I  said,"O  brother-in-law  to  Mr.  Spurgeon's  haberdasher, 
Who  seasonest  also  the  skins  of  Canadian  owls, 
Thou  callest  trousers  'pants,'  whereas  I  call  them  'trousers,' 
Therefore  thou  art  in  hell-fire  and  may  the  Lord  pity  thee !" 

O  God!    O  Montreal! 

"Preferrest  thou  the  gospel  of  Montreal  to  the  gospel  of 
Hellas, 

The  gospel  of  thy  connection  with  Mr.  Spurgeon's  haber- 
dashery to  the  gospel  of  the  Discobolus?" 

Yet  none  the  less  blasphemed  he  beauty  saying,  "The  Dis- 
cobolus hath  no  gospel, 

But  my  brother-in-law  is  haberdasher  to  Mr.  Spurgeon." 

O  God!    O  Montreal! 


39°  Poems 

vi 
The  Righteous  Man 

The  righteous  man  will  rob  none  but  the  defenceless, 
Whatsoever  can  reckon  with  him  he  will  neither  plunder  nor 

kill; 

He  will  steal  an  egg  from  a  hen  or  a  lamb  from  an  ewe, 
For  his  sheep  and  his  hens  cannot  reckon  with  him  hereafter — 
They  live  not  in  any  odour  of  def encefulness : 
Therefore  right  is  with  the  righteous  man,  and  he  taketh 

advantage  righteously, 
Praising  God  and  plundering. 

The  righteous  man  will  enslave  his  horse  and  his  dog, 
Making  them  serve  him  for  their  bare  keep  and  for  nothing 

further, 
Shooting  them,  selling  them  for  vivisection  when  they  can  no 

longer  profit  him, 

Backbiting  them  and  beating  them  if  they  fail  to  please  him ; 
For  his  horse  and  his  dog  can  bring  no  action  for  damages, 
Wherefore,  then,  should  he  not  enslave  them,  shoot  them, 

sell  them  for  vivisection  ? 

But- the  righteous  man  will  not  plunder  the  defenceful — 

Not  if  he  be  alone  and  unarmed — for  his  conscience  will 
smite  him; 

He  will  not  rob  a  she-bear  of  her  cubs,  nor  an  eagle  of  her 
eaglets — 

Unless  he  have  a  rifle  to  purge  him  from  the  fear  of  sin : 

Then  may  he  shoot  rejoicing  in  innocency — from  ambush  or 
a  safe  distance ; 

Or  he  will  beguile  them,  lay  poison  for  them,  keep  no  faith 
with  them; 

For  what  faith  is  there  with  that  which  cannot  reckon  here- 
after, 

Neither  by  itself,  nor  by  another,  nor  by  any  residuum  of  ill 
consequences  ? 

Surely,  where  weakness  is  utter,  honour  ceaseth. 

Nay,  I  will  do  what  is  right  in  the  eye  of  him  who  can  harm 
me, 


Poems  39  l 

And  not  in  those  of  him  who  cannot  call  me  to  account. 

Therefore  yield  me  up  thy  pretty  wings,  O  humming-bird ! 

Sing  for  me  in  a  prison,  O  lark ! 

Pay  me  thy  rent,  O  widow !  for  it  is  mine. 

Where  there  is  reckoning  there  is  sin, 

And  where  there  is  no  reckoning  sin  is  not. 

vii 
To  Critics  and  Others 

O  Critics,  cultured  Critics ! 

Who  will  praise  me  after  I  am  dead, 

Who  will  see  in  me  both  more  and  less  than  I  intended, 

But  who  will  swear  that  whatever  it  was  it  was  all  per- 
fectly right: 

You  will  think  you  are  better  than  the  people  who,  when 
I  was  alive,  swore  that  whatever  I  did  was  wrong 

And  damned  my  books  for  me  as  fast  as  I  could  write  them ; 

But  you  will  not  be  better,  you  will  be  just  the  same, 
neither  better  nor  worse, 

And  you  will  go  for  some  future  Butler  as  your  fathers 
have  gone  for  me. 

Oh !    How  I  should  have  hated  you ! 

But  you,  Nice  People ! 

Who  will  be  sick  of  me  because  the  critics  thrust  me  down 
your  throats, 

But  who  would  take  me  willingly  enough  if  you  were  not 
bored  about  me, 

Or  if  you  could  have  the  cream  of  me — and  surely  this 
should  suffice : 

Please  remember  that,  if  I  were  living,  I  should  be  upon 
your  side 

And  should  hate  those  who  imposed  me  either  on  myself 
or  others ; 

Therefore,  I  pray  you,  neglect  me,  burlesque  me,  boil  me 
down,  do  whatever  you  like  with  me, 

But  do  not  think  that,  if  I  were  living,  I  should  not  aid 
and  abet  you. 

There  is  nothing  that  even  Shakespeare  would  enjoy  more 
than  a  good  burlesque  of  Hamlet. 


392  Poems 


Vlll 

For  Narcissus 

(A) 
(To  be  written  in  front  of  the  orchestral  score.) 

May  he  be  damned  for  evermore 

Who  tampers  with  Narcissus'  score ; 

May  he  by  poisonous  snakes  be  bitten 

Who  writes  more  parts  than  what  we've  written. 

We  tried  to  make  our  music  clear 

For  those  who  sing  and  those  who  hear, 

Not  lost  and  muddled  up  and  drowned 

In  over-done  orchestral  sound; 

So  kindly  leave  the  work  alone 

Or  do  it  as  we  want  it  done. 

(B) 

Part  II 
Symphony 

(During  which  the  audience  is  requested  to  think  as  follows:) 

An  aged  lady  taken  ill 

Desires  to  reconstruct  her  will; 

I  see  the  servants  hurrying  for 

The  family  solicitor  ; 

Post-haste  he  comes  and  with  him  brings 

The  usual  necessary  things. 

With  common  form  and  driving  quill 

He  draws  the  first  part  of  the  will, 

The  more  sonorous  solemn  sounds 

Denote  a  hundred  thousand  pounds, 

This  trifle  is  the  main  bequest, 

Old  friends  and  servants  take  the  rest. 

'Tis  done !    I  see  her  sign  her  name, 

I  see  the  attestors  do  the  same. 

Who  is  the  happy  legatee? 

In  the  next  number  you  will  see. 


Poems  393 

ix 
A  Translation 

(Attempted  in  consequence  of  a  challenge.) 

"  'Mrs.  Harris,'  I  says  to  her,  'dont  name  the  charge,  for 
if  I  could  afford  to  lay  all  my  feller  creeturs  out  for  nothink 
I  would  gladly  do  it;  sich  is  the  love  I  bear  'em.  But  what 
I  always  says  to  them  as  has  the  management  of  matters, 
Mrs.  Harris,'  "  —  here  she  kept  her  eye  on  Mr.  Pecksniff  — 
"  'be  they  gents  or  be  they  ladies  —  is,  Dont  ask  me  whether  I 
wont  take  none,  or  whether  I  will,  but  leave  the  bottle  on  the 
chimley  piece,  and  let  me  put  my  lips  to  it  when  I  am  so 
dispoged.'"  (Martin  Chuszlewit,  Chap.  XIX). 


<!><;  29<rc''  ourckp 
'Appc 
irept  iilaOov  dvefpeo,  51.^8' 


TO(TJ 

^  xev  Xabv  STCOVT'  e?  {iot  86voc[i(<;  fe 

O(TOU  iTojerotvou  (Jc6Tou  6'  SXt?  ?v8ov 

dcarcaafcix;  xal  df[i.taOo<;  eouaa 

[Iv  X^XTpq)  X^aua  TavrjXeY^oi;  Oavderoto 

ati-d),  8?  xe  Oiivyjat  ^porciv  xal  ird-qxov 

dtXX'  ?x  -rot  !p£co  ai  8'  evl  ^peal  @<4XXso  aijaiv'"^ 

6ff(re  8d  ol  He^velipov  Ic^Spaxov 

"  'xefvotatv  Y<^P  iraot  ictyauaxoiJL^VTj  dyopsuw 


£)  q>(Xe,  There  <r6  TaOra  ^t'  avet'pezt;    068^ 
{o^^vat  ^  eOsXw  icfvetv  (x^6u,  ^e  xal  ouxf* 
e?  8'  &Y'  lie'  laxiipoquv  xiraO^  S^ica?  f)8£o<;  oTvou, 
gipp'  |v  %epalv  SXw  icfvouaii  TS  TepicoyLivT]  TS, 

-ce  xpoaOela'  6x6Tov  qpfXov  ^-rop  dtvd>YT3.'" 


X 

In  Memoriam 

Feb.  I4th,  1895 

TO 
H.  R.  F. 

Out,  out,  out  into  the  night, 

With  the  wind  bitter  North  East  and  the  sea  rough  ; 


394  Poems 

You  have  a  racking  cough  and  your  lungs  are  weak, 
But  out,  out  into  the  night  you  go, 

So  guide  you  and  guard  you  Heaven  and  fare  you  well ! 

We  have  been  three  lights  to  one  another  and  now  we  are  two, 
For  you  go  far  and  alone  into  the  darkness ; 
But  the  light  in  you  was  stronger  and  clearer  than  ours, 
For  you  came  straighter  from  God  and,  whereas  we  had 

learned, 

You  had  never  forgotten.    Three  minutes  more  and  then 
Out,  out  into  the  night  you  go, 

So  guide  you  and  guard  you  Heaven  and  fare  you  well ! 

Never  a  cross  look,  never  a  thought, 

Never  a  word  that  had  better  been  left  unspoken ; 

We  gave  you  the  best  we  had,  such  as  it  was, 

It  pleased  you  well,  for  you  smiled  and  nodded  your  head ; 

And  now,  out,  out  into  the  night  you  go, 

So  guide  you  and  guard  you  Heaven  and  fare  you  well ! 

You  said  we  were  a  little  weak  that  the  three  of  us  wept, 

Are  we  then  weak  if  we  laugh  when  we  are  glad  ? 

When  men  are  under  the  knife  let  them  roar  as  they  will, 

So  that  they  flinch  not. 

Therefore  let  tears  flow  on,  for  so  long  as  we  live 

No  such  second  sorrow  shall  ever  draw  nigh  us, 

Till  one  of  us  two  leaves  the  other  alone 

And  goes  out,  out,  out  into  the  night, 

So  guard  the  one  that  is  left,  O  God,  and  fare  him  well ! 

Yet  for  the  great  bitterness  of  this  grief 

We  three,  you  and  he  and  I, 

May  pass  into  the  hearts  of  like  true  comrades  hereafter, 

In  whom  we  may  weep  anew  and  yet  comfort  them, 

As  they  too  pass  out,  out,  out  into  the  night, 

So  guide  them  and  guard  them  Heaven  and  fare  them 
well! 

The  minutes  have  flown  and  he  whom  we  loved  is  gone, 
The  like  of  whom  we  never  again  shall  see ; 
The  wind  is  heavy  with  snow  and  the  sea  rough, 
He  has  a  racking  cough  and  his  lungs  are  weak. 


Poems  395 

Hand  in  hand  we  watch  the  train  as  it  glides 

Out,  out,  out  into  the  night. 

So  take  him  into  thy  holy  keeping,  O  Lord, 

And  guide  him  and  guard  him  ever,  and  fare  him  well! 


XI 

An  Academic  Exercise 

We  were  two  lovers  standing  sadly  by 
While  our  two  loves  lay  dead  upon  the  ground ; 
Each  love  had  striven  not  to  be  first  to  die, 
But  each  was  gashed  with  many  a  cruel  wound. 
Said  I :    "Your  love  was  false  while  mine  was  true." 
Aflood  with  tears  he  cried :    "It  was  not  so, 
'Twas  your  false  love  my  true  love  falsely  slew — 
For  'twas  your  love  that  was  the  first  to  go." 
Thus  did  we  stand  and  said  no  more  for  shame 
Till  I,  seeing  his  cheek  so  wan  and  wet, 
Sobbed  thus :    "So  be  it ;  my  love  shall  bear  the  blame ; 
Let  us  inter  them  honourably."     And  yet 
I  swear  by  all  truth  human  and  divine 
'Twas  his  that  in  its  death  throes  murdered  mine. 


xn 
A  Prayer 

Searcher  of  souls,  you  who  in  heaven  abide, 
To  whom  the  secrets  of  all  hearts  are  open, 
Though  I  do  lie  to  all  the  world  beside, 
From  me  to  these  no  falsehood  shall  be  spoken. 
Cleanse  me  not,  Lord,  I  say,  from  secret  sin 
But  from  those  faults  which  he  who  runs  can  see, 
'Tis  these  that  torture  me,  O  Lord,  begin 
With  these  and  let  the  hidden  vices  be; 
If  you  must  cleanse  these  too,  at  any  rate 
Deal  with  the  seen  sins  first,  'tis  only  reason, 
They  being  so  gross,  to  let  the  others  wait 
The  leisure  of  some  more  convenient  season; 

And  cleanse  not  all  even  then,  leave  me  a  few, 
I  would  not  be — not  quite — so  pure  as  you. 


396  Poems 


Xlll 

Karma 

(A) 

Who  paints  a  picture,  writes  a  play  or  book 

Which  others  read  while  he's  asleep  in  bed 

O'  the  other  side  of  the  world — when  they  o'erlook 

His  page  the  sleeper  might  as  well  be  dead ; 

What  knows  he  of  his  distant  unfelt  life? 

What  knows  he  of  the  thoughts  his  thoughts  are  raising, 

The  life  his  life  is  giving,  or  the  strife 

Concerning  him — some  cavilling,  some  praising  ? 

Yet  which  is  most  alive,  he  who's  asleep 

Or  his  quick  spirit  in  some  other  place, 

Or  score  of  other  places,  that  doth  keep 

Attention  fixed  and  sleep  from  others  chase? 

Which  is  the  "he"— the  "he"  that  sleeps,  or  "he" 
That  his  own  "he"  can  neither  feel  nor  see? 

(B) 

What  is't  to  live,  if  not  to  pull  the  strings 
Of  thought  that  pull  those  grosser  strings  whereby 
We  pull  our  limbs  to  pull  material  things 
Into  such  shape  as  in  our  thoughts  doth  lie  ? 
Who  pulls  the  strings  that  pull  an  agent's  hand, 
The  action's  counted  his,  so,  we  being  gone, 
The  deeds  that  others  do  by  our  command, 
Albeit  we  know  them  not,  are  still  our  own. 
He  lives  who  does  and  he  who  does  still  lives, 
Whether  he  wots  of  his  own  deeds  or  no. 
Who  knows  the  beating  of  his  heart,  that  drives 
Blood  to  each  part,  or  how  his  limbs  did  grow  ? 

If  life  be  naught  but  knowing,  then  each  breath 
We  draw  unheeded  must  be  reckon'd  death. 

(Q 

"Men's  work  we  have,"  quoth  one,  "but  we  want  them — 
Them,  palpable  to  touch  and  clear  to  view." 
Is  it  so  nothing,  then,  to  have  the  gem 
But  we  must  weep  to  have  the  setting  too  ? 


Poems  397 

Body  is  a  chest  wherein  the  tools  abide 

With  which  the  craftsman  works  as  best  he  can 

And,  as  the  chest  the  tools  within  doth  hide, 

So  doth  the  body  crib  and  hide  the  man. 

Nay,  though  great  Shakespeare  stood  in  flesh  before  us, 

Should  heaven  on  importunity  release  him, 

Is  it  so  certain  that  he  might  not  bore  us, 

So  sure  but  we  ourselves  might  fail  to  please  him? 

Who  prays  to  have  the  moon  full  soon  would  pray, 

Once  it  were  his,  to  have  it  taken  away. 

xiv 

The  Life  After  Death 
(A) 

MeAXopra  ravra 

Not  on  sad  Stygian  shore,  nor  in  clear  sheen 

Of  far  Elysian  plain,  shall  we  meet  those 

Among  the  dead  whose  pupils  we  have  been, 

Nor  those  great  shades  whom  we  have  held  as  foes ; 

No  meadow  of  asphodel  our  feet  shall  tread, 

Nor  shall  we  look  each  other  in  the  face 

To  love  or  hate  each  other  being  dead, 

Hoping  some  praise,  or  fearing  some  disgrace. 

We  shall  not  argue  saying  "  'Twas  thus"  or  "Thus," 

Our  argument's  whole  drift  we  shall  forget; 

Who's  right,  who's  wrong,  'twill  be  all  one  to  us ; 

We  shall  not  even  know  that  we  have  met. 

Yet  meet  we  shall,  and  part,  and  meet  again, 
Where  dead  men  meet,  on  lips  of  living  men. 

(B) 

HANDEL 

There  doth  great  Handel  live,  imperious  still, 
Invisible  and  impalpable  as  air, 
But  forcing  flesh  and  blood  to  work  his  will 
Effectually  as  though  his  flesh  were  there ; 
He  who  gave  eyes  to  ears  and  showed  in  sound 
All  thoughts  and  things  in  earth  or  heaven  above. 
From  fire  and  hailstones  running  along  the  ground 


398  Poems 

To  Galatea  grieving  for  her  love; 

He  who  could  show  to  all  unseeing  eyes 

Glad  shepherds  watching  o'er  their  flocks  by  night, 

Or  Iphis  angel- wafted  to  the  skies, 

Or  Jordan  standing  as  an  heap  upright — 

He'll  meet  both  Jones  and  me  and  clap  or  hiss  us 
Vicariously  for  having  writ  Narcissus. 

(C) 

HANDEL 

Father  of  my  poor  music — if  such  small 
Offspring  as  mine,  so  born  out  of  due  time, 
So  scorn'd,  can  be  called  fatherful  at  all, 
Or  dare  to  thy  high  sonship's  rank  to  climb — 
Best  lov'd  of  all  the  dead  whom  I  love  best, 
Though  I  love  many  another  dearly  too, 
You  in  my  heart  take  rank  above  the  rest ; 
King  of  those  kings  that  most  control  me,  you, 
You  were  about  my  path,  about  my  bed 
In  boyhood  always  and,  where'er  I  be, 
Whate'er  I  think  or  do,  you,  in  my  head, 
Ground-bass  to  all  my  thoughts,  are  still  with  me; 
Methinks  the  very  worms  will  find  some  strain 
Of  yours  still  lingering  in  my  wasted  brain. 


Index 


Abbey  Foregate,  342 

Abbey  Wood,  250 

Abnormal  Developments,  30 

Abraham,  Dr.,  Bishop  of  Well- 
ington, N.Z.,  40 

Absurd,  Which  is,  331 

"Academic  Exercise,"  An,  381, 
382,  395 

Academic  System  and  Repent- 
ance, 135 

Academies,  180,  292 

Academicism,  103 

Academy,  121 

Accident,  Design  and  Memory, 
61,  62 

Accounts,  Squaring,  160  et  seq. 

Accumulated  Dinners,  365 

Accuracy,  138 

Achilles,  The  Shield  of,  379,  385 

Acireale,  6,  7 

Action,  67,  68 

Action  and  Study,  139 

Actor,  360 

Adam  and  Eve,  243 

Adams  and  Leverrier,  313 

Advice  to  the  Young,  34 

^Egisthus,  345 

^neas  Silvius,  282 

^olian  Mode,  129 

A  First  Year  in  Canterbury 
Settlement,  i,  288,  369 

Agamemnon,  344,  364 

Agape,  123 

Agonising,  105 

Agrippa  and  Agrippina,  253 

Airolo.  272 


Alagna,  280 
Albert  Hall,  22 
Alcohol,  343 
Alexander  Bolus,  116 
Alfred   Emery   Cathie,   Mr.,  4, 
193,     250,     251,     286,     371, 

373 

Alive,  318 
Allah,  284,  285 
Allesley  School,  I 
"All  fear  of  punishment  is  o'er," 

118,  119 

Ally  Sloper's  Half-holiday,  262 
Alpine  passes,  133,  134 
Alps  and  Sanctuaries,  4,   238, 

250,    259    et    seq.,    273,    275, 

299,     304,     343»     35°,     368, 

376 

Material    for    a    Projected 


Sequel  to,  259  et  seq. 
Alps  pierced,  69 
—The,  by  Holbein,  153 
Alterni folium,  271 
"A.M."  Pseudonym,  40 
Amateurs     and     Professionals, 

145 

Ambiguity,  Studied,  290 
Amen,  280 

Amendes  Honourables,  348 
America,  not  a  good  place  in 

which  to  be  a  genius,  179 
Amoeba,  277,  321 
Amputation,  349 
Anachronism,  130 
"An      aged    lady    taken    ill," 

392 


399 


400 


Index 


Analogies   between   Crime   and 

Disease,  375 
Analogies  between  Organs  and 

Tools,  375 
Analogy,  311 
Analysis  of  the  Sales  of  my 

Books,  368,  369 
Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  311 
"Ancient  Mariner,"  The,  229 
Ancients  and  Moderns,  193 
Ancient  Work,  193 
"Ancora  sull'  Origine  Siciliana 

dell'  Odissea,"  5 
Andersen,  Hans,  231 
Anderson,  Revd.   Charles,   379, 

380 

"And  in  it  he  placed,"  385 
Andromeda,  225 
"And  the  government  shall  be," 

118 
"And     the     Johnians     practise 

their  tub,"  384 
Angelico,  Era,  230 
Angels,  Entertaining,  158 
"Angelus,"  Millet's,  259 
Anglican  Catholic,  342 
Animals  understanding,  77 
Annuity,  Outliving,  374 
Ansidei  Raffaelle,  The,   145   et 

seq. 

Antechambers,  Publishers',  dis- 
tasteful, 373 
Anthony,  S.,  56 
Anthropomorphise,  266 
Anthropomorphising  the  Deity, 

309 

Antinous,  388 
Antitheses,  58 
Antony  and  Cleopatra,  156 
Ants,  266 
Aosta,  206 
Apollos,  325 
Apologia,  370-4 
Apology  for  the  Devil,  217 
Apple-woman,  243 
Appoggiatura,  112 


Apprentices,  Virtuous  and  Idle, 
326 

Appropriating,  122,  299 

Apricot  tree,  81 

Aquila,  265 

Archbishop  of  Canterbury,  285 

— of  Heligoland,  235 

Archimedes,  344 

Arctic  volcano,  179 

Argument,  165,  328 

Argument  and  Assertion,  164 

Arnold,  386 

Arnold,  Dr.,  365 

Arnold,  Matthew,  184,  200,  202, 
203,  380 

Arnolfini,  John,  256 

Art  and  Trade,  170,  171 

— and  Usefulness,   173,   174 

— Difficulties  in,  102,  104 

—Early,  154 

— Great  and  Sham,  137 

— Greatness  in,   108 

— Improvement  in,  139 

—Life  and,  351 

— Money  and  Religion,  229 

— of  Co  very,  180 

— of  Propagating  Opinion, 
164 

— Schools,  2,  136 

Arts,  The,  107 

— Conveyancing  and  the,  96 

— Money  and  the,  171,  172 

Article-dealing,  Literature  and, 
170 

Articles,  Essays,  Stories,  Un- 
written, 229 

Artist,  The,  and  the  Shop- 
keeper, 169 

Artists  a  dumb  folk,  128,  129 

Asceticism,  291 

"As  cheers  the  sun,"  120 

Asinometer,   184 

Asplenium  Trichomanes,  272 

Assertion  and  Argument,  164 

Assimilation,  82,  205 

— of  rhythm,  71,  210 


Index 


401 


Association,  65,  97 

— Painting  and,  138 

— Unconscious,  65 

Assonances,  383 

Assyrian  bas-reliefs,  242 

Astrology,  61 

Astronomical    Speculation,   An, 

232 

Athanasian  Creed,  323,  324 
Atheism,  230 
Atheist,  315,  316 
— Theist  and,  337 
Atheists,  275 
Athenaeum    (Club),  173 
Athenaum,  376 
Atoms,  73,  83,  84 
— and  Fixed  Laws,  72 
Atrophy,  231 

Attempts  at  Classification,  303 
Audience,  What,  to  write  for, 

109 

Auld  Robin  Gray,  267 
Aurora  Borealis,  269 
Author,  An,   the  worst  person 

to     write     his     own     notes, 

215 
"Author    of    Erewhon,"     The, 

an  article  by  Desmond  Mac- 

Carthy    in    the    Independent 

Review,  6 
Authoress  of  the  Odyssey,  The, 

378 

Authoress  of  the  Odyssey,  The, 
5,    187,    196,    199,    350,    368, 

376 

Authors,  364 
Authors,  Society  of,  373 
Automata,  289 

Babes  and  Sucklings,  The  Book 

of,  229 
Babies,    Night-Shirts    and,    85, 

86 
Baby   and    Great    Northern    A 

Shares,  53 
Baby-getting,  Justifiable,  289 


Bach  Choir  concert,  123 

Bach,  Emmanuel,  126 

Bach,     John     Sebastian,     no- 

113,  120,  121,  123 
— Appropriating  from,  121 
— Handel  and,  112 
Bachelor  incarnate,  33 
Backing  one's  own  opinion,  335 
Backwards,  living,  292 
Bacon,  Lord,  25,  150 
Bacon  for  Breakfast,  33 
Baker,  Mr.  John  H.,  288 
Baker  Street,  251 
Balance,  The  Flying,  231 
Ballad,  Refrain  for,  231 
Ballard,  William,  2,  225,  244 
Balloon,  miraculous,  296 
Balmoral,  Countess   of,  316 
Bankruptcy  Acts,  Tentative,  18 
Bank's  action,  Failure  of,  91 
Baptism,  Infant,  Doubts  as  to 

efficacy  of,  i 
Barley-water,  239 
Barnard's  Inn,  131,  153,  237 
Barocco,  260 
"Barrel-Organs,"  41 
Barrister  principle,  340 
Barristers,  The  two  at  Ypres, 

255-8 

Basaiti,  Marco,  150 
Basel,  4,  153,  376,  381 
Baselessness,  The,  of  our  ideas, 

3°9,  3Jo 

Basis  of  Life,  The,  227 
Bateson,  Professor,  F.R.S.,  7 
Bath,  Wife   of,  262 
"Batti,  batti,"  122 
Baxter,  Richard,  326 
Beale,  Sir  Wm.  Phipson,  Bart., 

K.C.,  M.P.,  8,  253 
Beard,  311 

Bears,  The  Three,  277,  278 
Beauties  of  Nature,  270 
Beauties  Sleeping,  116 
Beauty,  335,  389 
Bed-key,  65 


402 


Index 


Bee,  49,  62,  266,  355 

Beer,  312 

Beer  and  my  cat,  86,  87 

Bees,  280 

Beethoven,   no,   in,   115,   122, 

126,  132,  258,  263,  264 
Beginning,  312 
Belgian  Town  Fairs,  345 
Bellini,   13,   135,   149,   150,   152, 

173,   179,   188,  235,  257,  258, 

357,  376,  378 

Bellini,  Trying  to  buy  a,  152 
Bellinzona,  260,  272 
Bells,  85,  246,   263,  266,  267 
Berg  (Swedish  painter),  243 
Berlioz,  133 
Bernard,  St.,  267 
Bertoli  and  his  Bees,  280 
Biella,  342 
Billiard  ball,  311 
Billiard  balls,  9 
Biographical  Statement,  1-8 
Birrell,    Rt.    Hon.    Augustine, 

K.C.,  M.P.,  7 
Birth,  289 
Birth  and  Death,  Functions  of 

one  another,   15 
— Fear  of,  289 
— The   hour    of,    Praying    for, 

289 

— Unconscious,  16 
Birthright,  My,  182 
Bishop,     an     English     one     at 

Siena     and     S.     Gimignano, 

274-6 

Bishop  Ken,  214 
—of  Carlisle,  31,  32,  254 
Chichester  at  Faido,  271, 

272 

Lichfield,  i 

Peterborough,  250,  251 

Bishops,  327 

Blake,  Dante,  Virgil  and  Tenny- 
son, 183 
Blasphemy,  348 
—Real,  341 


"Blessing,  Honour,  Adoration," 

121 

Blundering  in  business  and  in 

science,  218 

Bodies,  Our,  an  art,  278 
— Our  trivial,  22 
Body,    the    manifesto    of    the 

mind,  362 

— pincers,    bellows,    and    stew- 
pan,  1 8 

— The,  and  its  work,  21-23 
Bohemian  existence,  345 
Book,  396 
Book  of  Babes  and  Sucklings, 

The,  229 

Book  of  Essays,  A,  368,  369 
Book,  What  sells  a,  161 
Book-keeping,  4 
Books,  107,  357 
— and  Children,  106 
— like  Souls,  95 
— My,   1 06,  158  et  seq.,  366  et 

seq. 
Analysis  of  the  sales  oi, 

368-9 
— On    the    making    of    Music, 

Pictures  and,  93  et  seq. 
— Rules  for  the  making  of,  96, 

97 

— should  be  tried  by  judge  and 

jury,  107 

—The  life  of,  106 
Boots,  240 
Bore,  a  clever,  383 
Born,    What    happens    to    you 

when  you  are,  15,  16 
Borrowing,  290 
— in  music,  123-9 
Boss,  Mrs.,  364 
Botticini,  146 
Bottom-heavy,  329 
Boulogne,  252,  254,  263 
Boycott,  369 
Brahms,  130 
Brain,  85 
— My  wasted,  398 


Index 


403 


Brandy  and  water,  211 

Brave,  The,  deserve  to  lose  the 

fair,  234 

Bread,  Our  daily,  352 
Breakfast,  Bacon  for,  33 
Breeding    and    the    Mendelian 

Discovery,  16 
Breeding    from    weak    opinion, 

164 

—Good,  34,  340 
Bregaglia,  Val,  264 
Breton  fishermen,  36 
Brevity,  101 
Brighton,  336 
British  Museum,  2,  5,  6,  8,  41, 

81,   156,    161,    165,   204,   218, 

237,  242 
British  Public,  Handel  and  the, 

"3 
"Brother,   I   am   much   pleased 

with  Samuel  Butler,"  387 
Brougham,   Lord,   his  trousers, 

261 

Brown,  Mrs.,  and  spoiled  tarts,  9 
Browne  medals,  292 
Browning,  Mrs.,  186 
Buddha,  255 
Buddhism,  337 
Buffon,  3,  107,  378 
Bug,  The  smell  of  a,  246 
Bunyan,  326,  327 
— and  Others,  188  et  seq. 
— and  the  Odyssey,  191 
Burglars,  23 
Buried   alive   before   marriage, 

293,  294 
Burleigh,   Lord,   and  Eumaeus, 

195 

Burlesque,  391 
Burton  (Anatomy),  311 
'Bus  conductor,  244 
— driver,  244 

Business,  Science  and,  217 
Butcher-boy,  88 
Butler,  A.  J.,  186 
Butler  (Analogy),  311 


Butler,  Revd.  Samuel,  D.D.,  i, 
4,  32,  378  (see  Life  and  Let- 
ters of  Dr.  Butler) 

Butler,  Samuel,  and  the  Press, 
N.Z.,  i,  2,  8,  39-42 

Particulars  of  his  life  and 

works,  1-8 

Portraits  of,  3,  5 

-quoted  by  A.  D.  Darbi- 

shire 

see  under   Samuel  Butler 

Butler,  Rev.  Thomas,   1-4 

Butler,  Some  future,  391 

Butler,  Thomas  William  Gale,  2 

— Letter  to,  53  et  seq. 

Butler's  Stones,  288 

Butterflies,  250,  306 

Buzzy  bee,  How  doth  the  little, 
266 

Byron,  244 

Calais,  213 

—to  Dover,  253,  254 

Cam,  386 

Cambridge,  i,  4,  6,  7,  no,  253, 

379 

— Professorship  of  Fine  Arts,  4 
Canada,  3,  379 
Canadians,  French,  136 
Cannibalism,  29,  30 
Canon  of  Chichester,  271 
Cant,  230 

— and  Hypocrisy,  341 
"Cantab"  (pseudonym),  304 
Canterbury  Museum,  N.Z.,  41 
Canterbury  Pilgrims,  262 
Canterbury  Province,  2 
Canterbury  Settlement,  A  First 

Year  in,  i,  288,  369 
Canto  Fermo,  267 
Capping  a  success,  156 
Caracal,  The,  81 
Carcassone,  the  Odyssey  and  a 

tomb  at,  198 
Cards,  leaving  them  at  church, 

342 


404 


Index 


Careful  Investigation  as  En- 
couraging Casuistry,  296 

"Carefully,"  290 

Carestia,  Zeffirino,  198 

Carletti,  Signora  Cesira,  282 

Carlisle,  Bishop  of,  31,  32,  254 

Carrodus,  242 

Gary's  Art-School,  2 

Casale-Monferrato,  270,  350 

Cash  and  Credit,  168  et  seq. 

Cassell  and  Co.,  201 

Castelvetrano,  Labourers  at, 
194 

Casuistry,  296 

Cat,  Beer  and  my,  86,  87 

Ideas  and  Mouse-Ideas,  216 

— Saying  "Hallelujah"  to  a,  65 

—The  Jumping,  339 

Catherine,  S.,  by  Raffaelle,  146, 
148,  149 

Cathie.  See  Alfred  Emery 
Cathie 

Catholic,  A,  342 

Catholicism,  333 

Catholics,  336 

Cato,  Miss,  207 

Cats,  238 

Cattle  drinking,  81 

Cell,  The  primordial,  55 

"Cellarius"  (pseudonym),  2, 
41,  46 

Cells,  Our,  84,  86,  89 

Century  Club,  157,  184,  379 

Cephas,  33 

Chance,  297,  322 

Chancellor's  Medal,  291 

Chancery  Lane,  87 

Change,  315 

Change  of  circumstances  and 
memory,  63 

Change  and  Immorality,  29 

Changes  of  substance  cognised, 

75 

Channel  for  water,  348 
— Passage,  The,  255 
Chapel,  Primitive  Methodist,  341 


Chapman  and  Hall,  186 

Chapters  in  Music,  130,  131 

Character,  A  man's,  and  his 
work,  1 88 

—My,  187 

Characteristics,  Acquired,  96 

Charing  Cross,  70,  237 

Charles  Darwin  and  Samuel 
Butler:  A  Step  towards  Re- 
conciliation, 8,  376 

Charles  I,  233 

Charybdis,  Scylla  and,  230,  326, 

327 

Chatto  and  Windus,  201 

"Che  faro,"  132 

Chemical  Properties,  69 

Cherubini,  100 

Chiavenna,  261 

Chichester,  Bishop  of  and  Can- 
on of,  271,  272 

Chicken,  66,  69 

Chickens,  Clergymen  and,  56 

— Sailor  Boy  and,  245 

Child-Birth,   106 

Childish  to  deny  or  to  attempt 
to  define  God,  326 

Children,  Books  and,  106 

— Tracts  for,  229 

China,  Mr.  Gladstone  selling 
his,  165 

Choice,  319,  320,  321 

— of  Subjects,  105 

Chords,  Common,  226 

Chord,  the  Lost,  280 

Christ,  236,  260,  324,  348 

—and  the  L.  and  N.W.  Rail- 
way, 339 

Christ  is  Equilibrium,  73 

Christs,  Infant,  257 

Christchurch,  N.Z.,  i,  2,  3, 
40 

Christian,  The,  337,  352 

— minister  and  bad  £10  note, 
190 

— miracles,  Improbability  of, 
335 


Index 


405 


Christianity,  230,  276,  311,  334, 

335,  337,  340,  342,  347,  35 1, 

352,  375 

— Society  and  350,  351 
Christians,  350 
Christmas  at  Boulogne,  254 
— Eve,  ivy  and  holly,  61 
Christie's,  152,  165 
Chronicles,  292 
Church,  The,  159,  307,  340,  366 

and  the  Rectory,  334 

and  the  Supernatural,  340 

feasts    of    the,    too    much 

neglected,  61 
—of  England,  The,  338 
— The  English,  abroad,  342 

of  Rome,  338 

of  the  future,  229 

Churches,  The,  in  an  equivocal 

position,  190 
Churchyard,    living    nearer    to 

the,  89 
Cider,  387 

Cima  da  Conegliano,  150 
Cities,  Unburying,  370 
Civilisation  in  the  Iliad,  196 
Clacton  Belle,  262 
Claro,  272 

Classical  Review,  The,  377 
Classification,  218,  303 
Clergy,  The,  374 

Ourselves  and,  351 

Clergyman,  An  English,  342,  343 
Clergyman's  Doubts,  A,  3,  304- 

8,  380 

Clergymen  and  Chickens,  56 
— born  not  hatched,  56,  57 
Clergymen  and  Doctors,  226 
Clifford's  Inn,  2,  237-9 

Euphemism,  238 

Climbing,  103 

Clodd,  Mr.  Edward,  379 

Clothes,  36 

Cobbe,  Miss  Frances  Power,  207 

Cobham,  231 

Cobwebs  in  the  dark,  60 


Cock  Tavern,  The,  239,  240 

Coffee,  273 

Coins  and  words,  95 

— of  all  nations,  277 

— potential  money,  95 

Colborne-Veel,  Miss,  40 

Cold,  315 

Colour,  141  et  seq. 

— shade  and  reputation,  138 

— Words  and,  144 

Colourist,  A  great,  144 

"Come,  O  Time,"  116 

Commentators,  Homer  and  his, 

196 

Commerce,  341 
Common  Chords,  226 
— form,  125 

Commonplaces,  Handel's,  115 
Common  Sense,  370 

and  Philosophy,  330 

Reason  and  Faith,  328 

The  Voice  of,  348 

Compensation,  157 
Competency,  Vows  of  modest, 

290 

Complete  Death,  355 
Composition  (painting),  140 
Compression  (literature),  100 
Conceit  left  in  the  box  as  well 

as  Hope,  170 
Conflict  of  duties,  84 
Conscience,  Jones's,  219 
Consciousness,  73 
—Vanishing,  53 
Conservatism    and    Liberalism, 

340 
Conservative,       The       healthy 

stomach,  82 

Contemplation,   Man  of,  367 
Continued  Identity,  353-5 
Continuity  of  existence,  54 
Contradiction    in    Terms,    164, 

210,  299,  301,  314,   315,   316 

et  seq. 

Contributions  to  evolution,  66 
Con-venience,  310 


406 


Index 


Convenience,  301-3 

— God  and,  347 

— Truth  and,  297  et  seq. 

"Convey  me  to  some   peaceful 

shore,"  116 

Conveyancing  and  the  arts,  96 
Conviction,  328,  329 
Convictions,    Our    profoundest 

are  unspeakable,  93 
Cooking,  81,  222 
Cooper,  Fenimore,  265 
Copernicus,  302 
Copies  of  notes,  363 
Corelli,  188 
Corn,  325,  326 
Corn-laws,  342 
Coroners'  Inquests,  325 
Corpse,  353 
Corpse-hood,  354 
Correggio,  146 
Cosimo,  S.,  281 
Costa,  Sir  Michael,  113 
Costermongers  of  religion,  222 
Coterie,  Literary  and  Scientific, 

369 

Coton,  387 
Cotton  Factories,  21 
Counsels  of  Imperfection,  24 
Counterpoint,  5,  113,  267,  315 
Countess  of  Balmoral,  316 
Countries,  Imaginary,  105 
Cousin,  my,  241,  242,  250 
Covery,  the  art  of,  180 
Cow,  261,  285 
Cow,  eyes  like  a,  233 
Cow-bells,  85,  267 
Cows,  255,  308 
Crea,  5 
Creating,  The  less  a  man  creates 

the  better,  143 
Credit,  Cash  and,  168  et  seq. 
—System,  The,  328 
Credulous   Eye,  The,   138 
Creeds,  Wants  and,   336 
Creighton,    Dr.    Mandell,    250, 

251 


Cricket,  386 

Crimea,  The  Grotta,  261 

Crime    and   disease,   Analogies 

between,  375 
Critic,  A  Lady,  156 
Criticism,  107 
— Diderot  on,  187 
— Musical,  123,  130 
Critics  and  Others,  To,  380,  391 
— fitness  and  unfitness,  107 
Crivelli  Carlo,  146 
Croesus   and  his   kitchen-maid, 

89-92 

Crossing  oneself,  274 
Crowe  and  Cavalcaselle,  376 
Crows,  230,  266 
Crucifixion,  324,  375 
"Crucifixion"  by  Holbein,  153 
Crumby  Woman,  267 
Crystal  Palace,  260 
Cuckoo,  327,  337 
Cunning,  315,  319,  320,  322,  323 

Damiano,  S.,  281 

Danaids,  344,  345 

Dando,  242 

Danse,  La,  4,  376 

Dante,  150,  183 

Darbishire,  Mr.  A.  D.,  16 

Dardanelles,  283-5 

"Darwin  among  the  Machines," 

2,  8,  39-42  et  seq. 
Darwin,  Charles,  3,  4,  8,  39,  40, 

70,    161,   243,   265,   322,   339, 

375,  376,  3?8 
Darwin,  Erasmus,  3,  378 
Darwin,  Mr.   Francis,  F.R.S.,  8, 

243 

"Darwin     on    the     Origin     of 
Species.     A  Dialogue,"  i,  8, 

39-41 

Darwinians,  374 
David,  214,  224,  230 
David,  Gheeraert,  147 
Da  Vinci,   Leonardo,  257,  376, 

378 


Index 


407 


Daughter,  My,  249 

Day,  195,  315 

Day,  Mr.  Lewis,  253 

Days,  Our,  12 

De  Minimis  non  curat  Lex,  209 

Veritas,  299 

Dead,  318,  357,  365,  370 
"Deadlock  in  Darwinism,"  375, 

376 
Death,  22,  23,  79,  314,  315,  318, 

353  et  seq, 
— A  luxurious,  37 
— and  life,  93 
— Apprehended,  382 

beds,   Christian,  229 

— Bid  him  take,  359 

— Birth  and,  15 

—Complete,  355 

— Foreknowledge  of,  353 

—Ignorance  of,  356,  357 

— Indifference   to,    undesirable, 

214 

— in  life,  76 
— is  equilibrium,  73 
—Life  and,  355 
— Making  ready  for,  229 
— Preparation  for,  362 
—The  Defeat  of,  355 
—The  Dislike  of,  55,  358,  359 
—The  Torture  of,  355,  356 
— unconscious,  16 
Debts,  292 

Decimal,  Recurring,  68 
Defeat  of  Death,  The,  355 
Defencefulness,  Odour  of,  390 
Definitions,  220,  221 
"Deh  Vieni,"  252 
Deity,    The    Homeric    and   the 

Pall  Mall  Gazette,  33 
Deliver  us  from  evil,  213 
Delphi,   351 
Demand,  315 
D'Enrico,   378 
Dentist,  My,  240 
De  profundis,  106 
Descent  with  modification,  55 


Design,  60,  61 
— Memory  and,  56  et  seq. 
Despising  the  world,  365 
Destroy  and  fulfil,  335 
Destruction  and  Death,  169 
— of  works  of  art,  179 
Detail,  137,  138 
Development,  95 
Developments,  Abnormal,  30 
Devil,  224,  226,  235,  236,  267, 

315  . 

— A  mischievous,  226 
— An  Apology  for  the,  217 
— and  God,  25 
—God  and  the,  333,  334 
Devils,  228 

"Diary  of  a  Journey"  to  take 
MSS.    of    three    of    Butler's 
books  to  Italy  and  Sicily,  7 
Diavolo,   Santo,  274 
Dickens,  Handel  and,  134 
Dickens    and    unconscious    hu- 
mour, 32 

Dickens  and  Rochester,  32 
Dictionary    of    National    Bio- 
graphy, The,  365 
Diderot  on  criticism,  187,  188 
Die,     What     happens    to    you 

when  you,  15,  16 
Differences,  62,  83 
Difficulties  in  Art,  102,  104 
Diffuseness,  101 
Digestion,  82 

Dim  religious  light,  The,  338 
Dinners,  Accumulated,  365 
Disappointing  person,  Myself  a, 

r,-158 

Disappointment,  311 
Discobolus,  388,  389 
Discords,  129,  130,  225 
Disease    and   crime,   Analogies 

between,  375 
— The          fear-of-giving-them- 

selves-away,  293 
Diseased  physically,  296 
Diseases  of  friendship,  230,  382 


408 


Index 


Disgrace,  397 
Disjoining,  21 
Dislike  of  Death,  The,  358,  359, 

381 

Dissimilarity,  55 

Dissolution,  357,  358 

Dives,  362 

Divorce,  234,  252 

Doctors,  38 

— and  clergymen,  226 

Doctors'  Commons,  244 

Dodging  fatigue,  27 

Dog,  137,  220,  245,  246,  390 

"Doge,"   Bellini's,   173 

Doing,  Worth,  369 

Doll,  346 

Dolls,  Prayers  are  as,  212 

Domenichino,  150 

Dominant,  129,  130,  226,  260 

Don,  Captain,  274 

Donatello,  195 

Doncaster,  Mrs.,  238 

Don  Giovanni,  131 

Dorian  mode,  129 

Doubt  and  hope,  369,  370 

Doubts,  A  Clergyman's,  304 

Dover,  253,  254 

Dow,  Gerard,  99,   100 

Dowe,  Mrs.,  259 

Dowie's  shop,  240 

Dragon,  Andromeda's,  225 

Dragons,  160 

Drapers,    Scientists  and,  218 

Draper's  store,  303 

Drapery,  147 

Dress,  107,  108 

Drinking,  My  books  do  not  take 
to,  366 

Drivel  from  one  of  the  Kings- 
leys,  34 

Drones,  Pedals  or,  225 

Dropping  off  of  leaves  and 
guests,  230 

Druggist's  store,  303 

Drunkard,  231,  349 

Drunkenness,  342,  343 


Drury  Lane  theatre,  131 
Duckling,  The  Ugly,  231 
Ducklings,  A  string  of,  84 
Ducks  on  the  Serpentine,  63 
Dullness,  179,  193 
Dullnesses  of  virtue,  28 
Dull  people,  294 
Dumb-bells  academic,  219 
Dunstable,  John,  in 
Dunstan's,  St.,  bells,  246 
Dupes,  296 

Duties,  Conflict  of,  84 
Duty,  231 
Dvorak,  130 
Dynamical,  67,  68,  73 

Eagle,  i,  5,  6,  379,  380 
Eagle,  390 

"Eagles  were  not  so  swift,"  65 
"Earnest  Clergyman,"  An,  304, 

308 

Eat  and  drink,  Let  us,  361 
Eating  and  proselytising,  81 
Eating  grapes   downwards,  98, 

99 

"Ecce  Homo"  by  Correggio,  146 
Ecclesiastes,  201,  203 
Eclat,  370 
Editing  notes,  215 
Effort  of  retaining  evacuations, 

17 

Effort  to  live,  358 
Egg,  16,  67,  69,  70,  85,  100,  249, 

272,  291,  363,  390 
— and  hen,  16,  390 

powders,  245 

Eggs  do  not  become  clergymen, 

56 

— New-laid,  249 
Ego  and  non-ego,  321-3 
Electric  light,  242 
Elementary  Morality,  24  et  seq. 
Eliot,  George,  160 
Elmsley  writing  to  Dr.  Butler, 

215 
Elysian  plain,  397 


Index 


409 


Embankment,      Thames,      237, 

238 

Embryo,  16,  354,  361 
Emendators    of    corrupt    text, 

286 

Empire,  The  Roman,  206-7 
End,   Let  me  not   know  mine, 

212 

—Longing  for,  355,  356 
Endings,  312 
Endowing  science  and  religion, 

340 

Energy,  An,  76 

Enfant  Terrible,  The,  of  litera- 
ture, 183 

England  musically-minded,   128 
Englefield  Green,  249,  250 
English    Church    abroad,    The, 

342 

— composers,  Old,  115 
— fisherman,  36 

Englishman,  A  stupid  old,  285 
Englishmen,  Italians  and,  207 
Enquiry,   Every,   pursued   with 

passionate  longing,  373 
Entertaining  angels,  158 
— Myself  not  very,  158 
Entrails,  330 
Entuning   the   sky,    165 
Ephemeral       and       Permanent 

Success,  1 80  et  seq. 
Epiphany,  223 
Equal  temperament,  Philosophy 

and,  327 

Equilibrium,  73,  78,  79 
Equivocal  generation,  72 
Erewhon,  2,  3,  16,  26,  39  et  seq., 

106,  155-8,  161,  186,  187,  252, 

288,  289,  296,  317,  368,  372, 

374,  375 

— The  geography  of,  288 
— The  Germs  of,  39  et  seq. 
— the  oracle,  26 
— Dinners,  The,  7,  8 
Erewhon  Revisited,  6,  369,  375 
Material  for,  288  et  seq. 


Erewhon  to  be  visited  by  the 
son  of  the  original  writer,  296 

"Erl  Konig,"  133 

Ernest  Pontifex,  115 

Erudite  Research,  Society  for 
the  Repression  of,  180 

Eryx,  Mount,  5 

Esau,  268 

Essays,  A  Book  of,  368,  369 

Essays,  Articles,  Stories,  Un- 
written, 229 

Essays  on  Life,  Art  and  Sci- 
ence, 5,  6,  369,  376 

Esther,  Book  of,  201 

Eternal  matter  and  mind,  314 

Ether,  Waking  up,  68 

"Ethics,"  Letter  signed,  304-8, 
380 

Etruscan  Urns  at  Volterra, 
276-9 

Euclid,  330,  331 

Eumaeus    and    Lord    Burleigh, 

195 

Europe  in  a  blaze,  219 
Evacuations,  17 
Evans,  R.  W.,  32 
Evasive  nature,  226 
Evening  Hymn,  The,  immoral, 

214 

Evidence,  217,  315,  335 
Evidence  for  the  Resurrection, 

3.69,  375 

Evil,  204,  205,  352 
Evil  One  among  the  birds,  An, 

305 
Evolution,  66,  332,  375 

Evolution  Old  and  New,  3,  4,  8, 

66,  120,  368,  375 
Ewe,  390 

Ex  nihilo  nihil  fit,  312,  314 
Ex  Voto,  5,  275,  368,  375 
Examiner,  3,  7,  304,  380 
Examiner's  dinner,  291 
Excellence,  Physical,  26 
Excess,  291 
Excursion  train,  229 


410 


Index 


Exercise,  An  Academic,  395 
Exploding,  Death  wants,  358 
Expression  and  existence,  95 
Extracts  from  the  Note-Books 

of  Samuel  Butler  in  the  New 

Quarterly,  7 
Extremes,  315,  316 
—meet,  25 

Eyck,  Van,  98,  99,  149,  153,  256 
Eye,  138 
Eyes,  139 
— like  a  cow,  233 
Eynsford,  247 

Faddist,  361 

Fads,  Fancies  and  Theories,  232 

Faesch,  Hans  Rudolf,  381 

Faido,  263,  271 

Failure  of  bank's  action,  91 

Failure,  My,  370-4 

— One  form  of,  224 

Fair  Haven,  The,  2,  368,  374, 

3.75,  382 

Faith,  315,  330,  331,  336 
— and  Reason,  171,  333 
— Common  Sense  and  Reason, 

328 

— Logic  and,  330 
— Sanctified  by,  351 
Faith,  the  artist's,  171 
— The  test  of,  360,  361 
Faiths  and  formulae,  307 
Falsehood,   299-301,   305 
False  love,  395 
Fame,  Posthumous,  360,  361 
Family,  The,  31 
Family  Prayers,  2,  230 
"Fare  you  well,"  394 
Farrar,    Archdeacon,    crossing 

the  Channel,  213 
Farringdon  Street,  251 
Fascination,  268 
Fashion,  226,  278 
Fate,  314,  3!9>  322 
Father,  My,  and   Shakespeare, 

183 


Father,  My,  no  wish  to  see  him 

again,  32 
"Father  of  my  poor  music — if 

such  small,"  398 
— It  is  a  wise  tune  that  knows 

its  own,  122 
Fatigue,  Dodging,  27 
Faust,  258 
Fear  of  death,  356 
Fear-of-giving-themselves-away 

disease,  293 

Fear  of  the  Lord,  172,  204,  352 
Feeling,  78-90 
— Genuine,  185 
Feline  Languages,  Professor  of, 

289,  290 
Ferentino,  273 
Ferrari,  198,  256,  376,  378 
Fetter  Lane,  237 
Fetish-worship,  325 
Fiction,  The  great  characters  of, 

217 

Fielding,  191 

Fille  de  Madame  Angot,  La,  260 
Filosofia,  La,  264 
Filter,  280 

Financial  difficulties,  3,  4 
Financier,  Gladstone  as  a,   165 
Fine  Arts,  Professorship  of,  at 

Cambridge,  4 
Finger-nail,  A  torn,  63 
Fingers   cut  by  hard  and   fast 

lines,  170 
Fire,  242 
Firewood,  281 
First    Principles,    309    et    seq., 

330,  331 

First  Year  in  Canterbury  Set- 
tlement, A,  I,  288,  369 

FitzGerald,  James  Edward,  39, 
41,42 

Fitzwilliam  Museum,  3,  385 

Five-pound  note,  64 

Five  shillings,  347 

Fixed  laws,  Atoms  and,  72 

Flatter,  Tuning  death,  358 


Index 


411 


Fleet  Street,  237-9 

Flesh,  96,  332 

Flies  in  the  Milk-Jug,  216 

Flint  implement,  334 

Flocks,  23,  398 

Floods,  235 

Flowers,  Finding,  375 

Flushing,  383,  384 

Fly,  The,  305 

Folly,  Glacial  periods  of,  197 

Fore-knowledge  of  death,  353 

Foraminifera,  230,  266 

Formicomorphise,  266 

Fooling  around,  230 

Foolishness  and  wisdom,  168 

"Forgetting  and  forgot,"  116 

Forgive,  We  like  to,  349 

Forgiveness     and     Retribution, 

349 

Forsyth,  Mr.,  240 
Fortune,  good  or  ill,  223,322, 371 
Fortunes,  378 
Foundation,  330 
— Superstitious,  309 
Francis,  St.,  230 
Freeman,  Froude  and,  186 
Freethinker,  315,  352 
Freethinking  Father,  231 
'Free-will,  72,  314,  315,  321,  322 
— and  Necessity,  316  et  seq. 
French  town  fairs,  345 
Frenchmen,  207 
Friends,  359,  364,  371 
Friendship,  141,  230,  382 
Froude  and  Freeman,  186 
Fugue,  96,  100,  116,  125,  260 
Fundamental  Principles,  351 
Funerals,  342,  343 
Furber,  241,  242 
Fuseli  and  nature,  138 
Future,  Knowledge  of,  fatal, 232 
— and  Past,  220 
— state,   Ameliorating  the,   293 

Gadshill  and  Trapani,  193,  194 
Gaetano,  234 


Gaining  one's  point,  348 

Galatea,  398 

Gallows,  318 

Gamp,  Mrs.,  her  speech  trans- 
lated into  Greek  verse,  393 

Garlic,  270,  310 

Garner,  Professor,  185 

Garvagh,  Madonna,  148 

Gauntlet  of  Youth,  108 

Gaudenzio  Ferrari,  198,  256, 
376,  378 

Gavottes,  Minuets  and  Fugues,  4 

Gear,  Gathering,  388 

General  Confession,  I  cannot 
repeat  it  unreservedly,  184 

Generalism,  Specialism  and,  222 

Generation,  Equivocal,  72 

— addressing  the  next,  159 

Genius,  159,  174  et  seq.,  259 

— and  love,  176 

— and  providence,  180 

— and  the  unkind  fairy,   176 

— and  the  world,  176 

— a  nuisance,  180 

Gentleman,  36 

— The  Japanese,  245,  246 

Genuine  feeling,  185 

George,  St.  Perseus  and,  222 

George  I  and  II,  113 

—IV,  242 

Gerino  da  Pistoja,  276 

German  music,  127,  128 

Germans,  207 

Germs,  272 

— of  Erewhon  and  of  Life  and 
Habit,  39  et  seq. 

— within  germs,  70 

Getting  on,  372 

Giacalone,  Signor  Ignazio,  194 

Gig,  281 

Gimignano,  S.,  Siena  and,  274-6 

Giorgione,  135,  152 

Giotto,  149,  154 

Girl,  My  son  would  probably 
be  a,  366 

Giusti,  Giuseppe,  379 


412 


Index 


Glacial  periods  of  folly,  197 

Glaciers,  77 

Gladstone,    165,   212 

Gladstonian,  301 

Glory  of  God,  The,  34 

"Glory  of  the  Lord,"  And  the,  116 

Glory  as  a  test  of  respecta- 
bility, 281 

Gnosis,  123 

Goats,  267 

God,  93,  225,  226,  293,  301,  308, 
309,  314-16,  324-6,  330,  332, 
334,  337,  339,  34i,  346,  347, 
350,  35i,  363,  388-90,  394 

— and  Convenience,  347 

Flesh,  332 

Life,  332 

Mammon,  24 

Man,  33,  94 

Philosophies,  328 

the  Devil,  25,  333,  334 

the  Unknown,  324,  326 

— is  Love,  226 

God  the  Known  and  God  the 
Unknown,  3,  7 

Gods,  309 

—and  Prophets,  333 

God's  Laws,  26 

Goethe,  258 

Gogin,  Mr.  Charles,  2,  4,  5,  100, 
152,  243,  245,  246,  255 

Gogin,  the  Japanese  Gentleman 
and  the  Dead  Dog,  245,  246 

Going   away,   228 

Gold,  172 

mines,  224 

— thread,  146,  147 

Good-breeding,  34,  36 

Good  Faith,  The  limits  of,  229 

Good  may  come,  That,  230 

Goodwin,  Harvey,  Bp.  of  Car- 
lisle, 31 

Gopsall,  22 

Gospel  of  Hellas,  The,  389 

Montreal,  The,  389 

Gosse,  Mr.  Edmund,  C.B.,  LL.D.,  8 


Gothic  woman,  247 

Gounod-Barnby,  251 

Gower  Street,  266,  251 

Gozzoli,  Benozzo,  275 

Grail,  Holy,  290 

Grain,  The  Isle  of,  231 

Grandfather,  My,  and  myself, 
172,  173 

Grape-filter,  280 

Grapes,  Eating  them  down- 
wards, 98,  99 

— Sour,  60 

Grass,  324,  325 

Gratitude,  339 

—and  Revenge,  340,  341 

Gravel,  a  tool,  19,  20 

Gravity,  77 

Great  art  and  sham  art,  137 

Great  Bear,  The,  239 

Great  Eastern,  The,  43 

Great  Northern  A  Shares,  53 

Great  Russell  St.,  326 

Great  things,   179 

Great  Unknown  Source,  352 

Great  works,  106 

Greatest  men,  The  world  and 
its,  177 

Greatness,  219 

— in  art,  108 

—England's,  343 

Greece,  5,  283 

Greek  Art,  388 

Greeks,  The,  200-4,  207,  338 

Griffin,  The,  238 

Grosvenor,  Hon.  Mrs.  Richard, 

251 

Grotta  Crimea,  261 
— del  toro,  199 
Ground-bass,  398 
Growth,  297 

Grumbling,  Saints,  21 1,  212 
Guercino,  150 
Guido,  150 

Guinea-pig  review  success,  372 
Gulliver's  Travels,  190,  202 
Gumption,  293 


Index 


Gurney,  Edmund,  263 
Gyges,  The  true,  52 


Haberdasher,    Mr.    Spurgeon's, 

38? 

Habits,  Bad,  231 

Habits,  On  Breaking,  220 

Hack-writer,  No  chance  of  be- 
coming a,  167 

Hades,  343-5 

"Hailstone  Chorus,"  175 

Hailstones,  397 

Hair,  356 

Hallelujah,  65 

"Hallelujah  Chorus,"  The,  115, 

173 

Halter,  327 

Hamlet,  173,  175,  391 

Hamlet,  Don  Quixote  and  Mr. 
Pickwick,  217 

Hammer  and  lever,  20 

Hampstead  'bus,  244 

Hand,  The,  49 

Hands,  49 

Handel,  i,  13,  14,  22,  63,  101, 
110-14,  120,  121,  123,  126-8, 
131-3,  161,  174,  178,  179,  188, 
192,  252,  259,  263,  299,  357, 

363,  365,  377,  378,  384,  397, 

398 

— a  conservative,  115 
— and  a  letter  to  a  solicitor,  119 

Bach,  112 

Dickens,   134 

Dr.  Morell,  115 

Ernest  Pontifex,  115 

Homer,  112 

humanitarian  nonsense,  119 

Madame  Patey,  113,  263 

Marriage,  119 

Music,  no  et  seq. 

Shakespeare,  114 

Tennyson,  115 

the  British  Public,  113 

the  Speaking  Voice,  117 

the  Wetterhorn,  118 


Handel    Festival,    At    a,    133, 

134 

Handelian,  A  Yankee,  114 
Handel's  Commonplaces,  115 
— Rules  for  tuning,  128 
— Shower  of  rain,  120 
Handicapped  people,  103 
Hanging,  317,  341 
Hanging  the  dead,  365 
Happiness,  228,  345,  356 
— The  greatest,  of  the  greatest 

number,  294 

"Hark  how  the  Songsters,"  122 
Harmonics,  303,  315,  358 
Harmony,  315 
Harris,  Mrs.,  393 
Harrow  Weald,  248 
Harwich,  253 
Hartman,  Von,  3 
Hartog,  Professor  Marcus,  7 
Hate  and  Love,  83 
Hating,  216 

Hating,  Loving  and,  205,  206 
Haweis,  Revd.  H.  R.,  241 
Haydn,  in,  126 
"He  saw  the  lovely  youth,"  121 
Heads,  Veiled,  235 
Health,  Good,  370 
— Money  and  Reputation,  37 
Heat,  315 

— and  cold  relative,  76 
Heatherley's,  2,   139,  225 
Heatherley's  Holiday,  Mr.,  3 
Heaven,  394 
—and  Hell,  35 
— for  wicked  people,  290 
— The    Kingdom    of,    106,    168, 

169,  363 
Hebe,  345 

Heckmann  Quartet,  The,  263 
Hedge  and  train,  21 
Hedging  the  Cuckoo,  327 
Heir  to  a  fortune,  344 
Heligoland,  The  Archbishop  of, 

235 
Hell-Fire,  343-5 


Index 


Hell,  Heaven  and,  35 

Hellas,  The  gospel  of,  389 

Hen,  16,  249,  390 

Henry  IV,  156 

Henry  VI,  156 

Herculaneum,  230 

Hercules,  345 

Hercules,  118 

Heredity,  61,  62,  332,  375 

— and  Memory,  57,  66 

Herpes,  364 

Hering,  Dr.  Ewald,  of  Prague, 

3,  57,  66 

Hertfordshire,  64 
Herodotus,  379,  384 
Hesiod,  316 

"Hey  diddle  diddle,"  266 
Hicks,  Mrs.,  247,  248 
Higgledy-Piggledy,  215  et  seq., 

230 

Hindhead,  85 

Hired,  Waiting  to  be,  194 
Historical  Society  of  St.  John's 

College,  Cambridge,  7 
History,   Unsettling,  250 
Hoare,  Henry,  63  et  seq. 
Hobson,  385 
Hogarth,  188,  326 
Hokitika  Pass,  288 
Holbein,  107,  235,  378 
Holbein  at  Basel,  153 
— A   note   on   his  drawing   La 

Danse  at  Basel,  4 
Holbein  Card,  A,  368 
Holborn,  237 
— Viaduct  Station,  381 
Holly  on  Christmas  Eve,  61 
Holy  Ghost,  The,  1 60, 172, 175, 348 
Home,  32 
Homer,   32,  33,    178,    179,   192, 

260,  278,  363,  366,  378 
— and  the  Basins,  254 
— and  his  Commentators,  196 
— Handel  and,  112 
Homer's  Hot  and  Cold  Springs, 

283-7 


Homeric  Verse,  380,  393 
1'Homme,  le   Style  c'est,   107 
Homreopathy,   British   Associa- 
tion of,  7 

Homo  Unius  Libri,   The  Posi- 
tion of  a,  155  et  seq. 
Honesty,  122 
— a  low  virtue,  162 
Honour  after  death,  174 
— "ceaseth,"  316,  390 
Honour,  Codes  of,  93 
Honours,  Posthumous,  367 
Hoo,  the  Hundred  of,  231 
Hoodwinking  the  Public,  162 
Hooghe,  De,  153,  179,  188,  235, 

256 

Hoopoes,  283 

Hope,  Doubt  and,  369,  370 
— Conceit   left   in   the   box   as 

well  as,  170 
Horace,  48,  201,  207 
— at  the  Post  Office  in  Rome, 

262 

Horse,  390 

Hot  and  Cold  Springs,  283-7 
Housemaid,  Moliere's,  109 
Hudibras,  157,  159 
Human  wishes,  The  vanity  of, 

219 

Humanitarian  nonsense,  119 
Humanity,   Types   of  rich   and 

poor,  51,  52 
Humming-bird,  391 
Humour,  II,  165,  291,  309 
— My,  1 66 
"Humour  of  Homer,"  The,  5, 

255 
Humour,      Unconscious,      and 

Dickens,  32 

— Unconscious,  Myself  and,  166 
Hundred,      a,      years      hence, 

Writing  for,  109 
Hungarian  music,  127,  128 
Hutton,  Richard  Holt,  380 
Huxley,  232,  339 
Hyam,  Mr.,  241 


Index 


Hybrids,  their  sterility,  66 

Hyde  Park,  243 

Hydra,  101 

Hydrogen,  77 

Hymn,  The  Evening,  immoral, 

214 

Hymns,  251 
Hypocrisy,  Cant  and,  341 

Ice,  179,  329 

Ichthyosauri,  48 

Ida,  Mount,  283 

Ideas,  Cat  and  Mouse-,  216 

— Incoherency  of  New,  216 

— New,  106,  216 

— Our,  216 

— our,  Baselessness  of,  309,  310 

— shadows,  95 

— Words  and,  65 

Identity,  54,  60,  210 

—Continued,  353-5 

— Personal,  375 

Idle  Apprentice   and  Virtuous, 

326 

Idle  classes,  335 
Idyll,  An,  233 
Ightham  Mote,  250 
Ignorance,  339 
— of  Death,  356 
— the  basis  of  Knowledge,  57 
Ignotius  complex,  327 
Ignotum  simplex,  327 
Iliad,  The,  5,  6,  173-5,  185,  186, 

196,  254,  255,  277,  376,  377, 

380 
Iliad  in  English  Prose,  The,  6, 

368 

Ilium  and  Padua,  195 
Ill-used,  371 
Illusion,  229,  323,  357 
Image,  God  in  man's  own,  309 
Imaginary  Countries,   105 
— Worlds,  232 
Imagination,  310,  312 
Imaum,  285 
Immorality,  230 


'Immorality,  Change  and,  29 

Immortal  to  oneself,  357 

Immortality,  14,  362 

— A  good  average  three-score 
years  and  ten  of,  14 

Immune  to  poverty,  225 

Immutable  law,  322 

Imperfect  Lady,  The,  273 

Imperfection,  Counsels  of,  24 

Importances,  Relative,  97,  100 

Impression,  A  residuary,  273 

Impressionism,  153 

Improvement  in  Art,  139,  140 

Improvidence,  322 

Improvidence,  Providence  and, 
223 

"In  sweetest  harmony,"  65 

Inaccuracy,  300,  349 

Inarticulate  Touches,  137 

Incense  across  the  dining-room 
table,  274 

Increateness  of  Matter,  314 

Increment  of  knowledge,  312 

Incoherency  of  New  Ideas,  216 

Incomprehensibles,  Two,  323, 
324 

Indifference  to  death  unde- 
sirable, 214 

Indigestion,  82 

Individual,  358 

— The,  and  the  race,  15 

— The,  and  the  world,  antago- 
nism between,  12 

Individuality,  319 

Infamy  after  death,  Unde- 
served, 361 

Influence,  Moral,  81 

Influenza,  Severe,  75 

Ingenuity,  305 

In  Memoriam,  263 

"In  Memoriam  to   H.    R.   F.," 

393-5 

Innocents,  Massacre  of,  270 
Inoculation,  227 

Inorganic,  Organic  and,  19,  77-8 
Inscription  on  chapel,  341 


416 


Index 


Inspiration,  179 
Instinct,  266 
Insults,  Fancied,  61 
Intellectual  Rattlesnake,  268 
-  Self-indulgence,  27 
Intelligence,  77,  78 
— The,   Omnipresence  of,  77 
Intentions  of  parties  to  a  deed, 

T  96  - 
Intoxication,  343 

Introduction  of  Foreign  Plants, 

281 

Intuition,  315 
Ionian  mode,  129 
Iphis,  398 

Irreligion  of  Orthodoxy, The,  350 
Irving,  Washington,  265 
"Is,"  315 
"Is  not,"  315 
Isaac,  231 
Ishmael,  231 
Ismail  Gusbashi,  283-7 
Italian  peasant,  36 
— Priesthood,  On  the,  379 
Italians   and    Englishmen,    207 
—The,  207 

— The  early  composers,  115,  127 
Italian  trips,  371 
Italy,  i,  2,  in,  342 
Ithaca,  5 
Ivanhoe,  279 
Ivy  Hatch,  311 
Ivy  on  Christmas  Eve,  61 

Japanese  Gentleman,  The,  245, 

246 

Jephtha,  120 

Jesus  Christ,  341,  352,  375 
Jewels  in  pictures,  147 
Jews,  The,  200-4 
— The  return  of  the,  239 
Jig  in  G.  Minor,  Handel's,  101 
Job,  202-4 
Johnians,  384,  385 
John's,  St.,  College,  Cambridge, 

i,  3,  6,  7,  379 


Joining,  21 

Jones,  Henry  Testing,  3,  4,  5, 
7,  8,  65,  114,  121,  132,  133, 
153,  219,  237,  239,  246,  250, 

253,  376 

Jones,  Tom,  364 

Jones,  Tom,  202 

Jordan,  398 

Joseph  Andrews,  190 

Joshua,   1 20 

Journal  of  Philology,  195 

Jove,  345 

Jubilee  Sixpence,  136 

Judas  Maccabeus,  117,  118, 
1 20 

Judging  the  Dead,  365 

Juggles,  Words  are,  95 

Juices,  Gastric,  lose  their  co- 
gent fluency,  82 

Jumping  Cat,  The,  339 

Jupiter,  338 

Jupp,  Mrs.,  364 

Justice,  301,  340 

Justifiable  baby-getting,  289 

Jutes,  350 

Jutland  and  "Waitee,"  350 

Karma,   Squaring  the  account, 

15 

"Karma,"  Three  Sonnets,  396 
Kemp,  Mr.,  131,  ^53 
Ken,  Bishop,  214 
Kensington  Gore,  243 
Kensington       (South)       Art 

Schools,  2 

Kerr,  Miss  Grainger,  7 
Khartoum,  Sack  of,  244 
Kindliness,  352 
Kindly  disposition,  A,  331 
Kindness,  299 
Kinetic  theory,  376 
Kingdom  of  Heaven,  The,  106, 

1 68,  169,  363 
Kingdom,    The    Super-Organic, 

78 
Kingdom,  The  Unseen,  320 


Index 


Kingdoms,  The  mineral,  vege- 
table, animal,  mechanical,  43 

King's  College   Chapel,  385 

King's  Cross,  251 

King's  Parade,  385 

Kingsleys,  Drivel  from  one  of 
the,  34 

Kitchen-maid,  Croesus  and  his, 
89-92 

Kitten,  Naming,  108 

Knife,  285 

— and  string,  21 

Knives  and  forks,  99 

Know,  Trying  to,  160 

Knowing  what  gives  us  Plea- 
sure, 207-9 

Knowledge,  312 

— based  on  ignorance,  57 

— is  Power,  102 

Known  from  the  Unknown, 
The,  346 

Kosmos,  309 

Krause,  Dr.,  3 

L.  &  N.W.  Railway,  Christ  and 
the,  339 

Lady,  An  aged,  392 

Lady  Critic,  A,  156 

Lady  getting  photographed  and 
why,  163 

Lady,  The  Imperfect,  273 

Ladywell,  260 

Lamarck,  3,  378 

Lamb,  390 

Lang,  Andrew,  166,  197 

Langar,  i,  260 

Langton,  Robert,  32 

Language,  65 

Lark,  391 

Larken,  Mr.  E.  P.,  236 

Last  Supper,  257 

Latham,  Revd.  Henry,  253 

Laundress,  My,  313 

Law  Courts,  341 

Law,  The  written  and  the  un- 
written, 95 


Lawrence,  Gulf  of  St.,  269 

Laws  of  God,  26 

Lawson,  Marmaduke,  364 

Lawyers,  339 

Lay-figure,  The  model  and  the, 

!36,  137 

Layard,  Sir  Henry,  370 

Lazarus,  362 

Learning,   102-5 

Leather  Lane,  237 

Leave-taking,  228 

Legs,  Manzi's  too  hairy,  245 

Leonardo  da  Vinci,  257,  376, 
378 

Lethe,  358 

Letter,  A,  and  a  nervous  sys- 
tem, 85 

— to  a  solicitor,  Handel  and  a, 
119,  120 

Letters,  364 

Leventina,  Val,  271,  350 

Lever,  20,  43 

Leverrier,  313 

Lex,  De  minimis  non  curat, 
209 

Liar,  The  good,  made,  not  born, 

305 
Liberalism    and    conservatism, 

340 

Lie,  An  absolute,  299 
Lies,  301 
Life,  10,  n,  15,  315,  318,  323, 

332,  354-6,  362,  384 
— A  means  of  prolonging,  229 
— A    short,    and   a   merry   one 

aimed  at,  14 
—after  death,  13,  23,  383,  397, 

398 

—an  art,  351,  352 
— and  Death,  93,  355 
Life  and  Habit,  3,  8,  30,  35,  39 

et  seq.,  41,   66,   71,   84,    156, 

157,   166,   185,   186,  225,  249, 

25o,  337,  368,  372 
The  Germs  of  Erewhon 

and  of,  39  et  seq. 


4i8 


Index 


Life  and  Letters  of  Dr.  Butler, 
5,  10,  215,  364,  368,  374,  377 

Life  and  Love,  227 

— beyond  the  grave,  13 

— easier  got  than  kept,  141 

— God  and,  332 

— in  death,  76 

— in  others,  13 

— is  it  worth  living?  17 

— My  squandered,  13 

— My,  the  extremes  of  plea- 
sure and  pain,  13 

— My  virtuous,  28 

— now  an  equation  of  only  99 
unknown  quantities,  57 

Life  of  books,  The,  106 

— of  the  World  to  Come,  The, 
229,  360  et  seq. 

— Posthumous,  358 

— The  Rules  of,  n,  351,  352 

— The  truest,  361,  362 

Light  and  Shade,  140,  328 

— The  Dim  Religious,  338 

Limbs,   Extracorporaneous,   50, 

Si 

Lincoln's  Inn  Fields,  237 
Lines,  Hard-and-fast,  cut,  170 
"Lips  of  living  men,"  397 
Literary  Man's  Test,  A,  109 
— Power,   1 08 
— Sketch-Book,  237 
Literature  and  Article-dealing, 

170 

— Difficulties  in,  102,  104 
— Emotion  not  words,  96 
— Many  mansions  in  the  king- 
dom of,  181 

— The  Enfant  Terrible  of,  183 
— useful  and  useless,  173 
Living  and  non-living,  71 
— in  others  is  the  true  life,  15 
Litigation,  338,  339 
Lizards,  n 

"Loathsome  Urns,"  1 16 
Logic,  329-31,  333,  346 
— and  Faith,  330 


Logic  and  Philosophy,  329 
Lohengrin,  35 
Lohengrin,  263 
Lombard  portals,  152 
London,  3,   161,  237,  342 
—Trees,  238 
London  wall,  A,  142 
Longden,  Mrs.,  no 
Longevity,  66 
Longfellow,  226 
Lord  of  the  Isles,  262 
Lord's  Prayer,  The,  349 
Lord,   And   the   Glory   of   the, 

116 
Lord,  The,  bringing  two  of  his 

children,  134 
— The   Fear   of  the,    172,  204, 

352 

— The  voice  of  the,  348 
— What  is  Man?  9  et  seq. 
Loredano  Loredani,  258 
Losing  cats,  238 
"Lost  Chord,"  The,  280 
Louis  XVI,  260 
Love,  226,  332 
— and  Hate,  83 
— and  Life,  227 
— cut     short     by    death,     359, 

38i 
— dried  up  and  withered,  359, 

38i 

— Genius  and,  176 
— God  is,  226 
— not   blighted   by    death,   359, 

38i 

shop,  The,  206 

Lovers,  Two,  395 

Loving  and  Hating,  205,  206 

Loving  God,  33 

Lucifer,  25 

Luck,   315,  319,   320,  322,  323, 

370 

— and  Success,  181 
Luck  or  Cunning?  4,  66,   173, 

368,  375,  376 
Lucky  and  Unlucky,  220 


Index 


419 


"Lucubratio  Ebria,"  2,  8,  39,  41, 

47  et  seq. 
Lugano,  131 
Luino,  Bernardino,  131 
Lute,  The  little  rift  within  the, 

16 

Lydian  mode,  129 
Lying,  300,  304,  308 
— Dissertation  on,  304 

Macbeth  witch,  248 

MacCarthy,  Mr.  Desmond,  6,  7 

McCormick,  Revd.  Canon  Jo- 
seph, D.D.,  379 

McCulloch,  119,  229 

Machines,  45-7,  50 

Madingley,  387 

Madonna,  230,  334 

— Ansidei,  145-51 

— di  S.  Sisto,  257 

— Garvagh,  148 

Magazines,  The  West-End,  181 

Magdalene,  Mary,  228 

Mahomedan,  The,  337 

Maid,  My  books'  mother's,  366 

Maigre,  Dining,  255,  256 

Mairengo,  271 

Maitland,  Mr.  J.  A.  Fuller,  7 

Makeshifts,  20 

Making  notes,  100,  101 

Making  of  Music,  Pictures  and 
Books,  On  the,  93  et  seq. 

— Literature,  Music  and  Pic- 
tures, Rules  for,  96,  97 

Mamma,  Does  she  know  ?  243 

Man,  9,  10,  50,  361 

— and  his  Organism,  18 

— a  tool-box,  18,  86 

— domesticated     by     machines, 

45 

— God  and,  33 
"Man  in  Vain,"  122 
Man,  Lord,  what  is?  9  et  seq. 
— shot  out  of  a  cannon,  78 
— The,  behind  the  words,  94 
Manners  Makyth  Man,  228 


Manning,  Cardinal,  255 

Man's  Place  in  Nature,  31 

Manzi,  the  model,  245 

Marbot,   186 

Mares'-Nests,  My,  377 

Market  Square,  385 

Marriage,  227,  341 

—and  the  Turk,  285 

— Handel  and,  119 

— of  Inconvenience,  230 

— Offers  of,  227 

Marrying  and  regretting,  284 

Martin  Chuszlewit,  380,  393 

Mary,  The  Great  Saint,  385 

— Magdalene,  228 

— Where's  my?  311 

Masterpieces,  292 

Masters,  the  old,  and  their  pu- 
pils, 135 

Match-box,  286 

Material  for  Erewhon  Revis- 
ited, 288  et  seq. 

— for  a  projected  Sequel  to  Alps 
and  Sanctuaries,  259  et  seq. 

Matter,  67,  68,  73 

Matter,  Mind  and,  74  et  seq. 

— Opinion  and,  80 

— Subdivisible,  82 

Maximum,  209,  299 

"May  he  be  damned  for  ever- 
more," 392 

Meanness,  Vices  of,  34 

Meannesses  of  Virtue,  34 

Meat-eating,  197 

"Mecaenas,"  262 

Mechanical  life,  kingdom, 
world,  43 

Mediocrity,  187,  188 

Me-e-at,  65 

Megalanthrope,  309 

Melchisedec,  33 

MAXotro  TOUTO,  397 

Member  of  Parliament,  314 

Memnon,  244 

Memoriam,  In,  263 

Memoriam,  In,  To  H.R.F.,  393 


420 


Index 


Memory,   61,   62,   69,    71,   312, 

332,  375 

— a  way,  an  echo,  58 

— and  Design,  56  et  seq, 

— and  heredity,  57,  66 

— and  Mistakes,  62,  63 

— and  Rhythm,  58 

— and  Viscosity,  58 

"Memory  as  a  Key  to  the  Phe- 
nomena of  Heredity,"  56 

"Memory  as  a  Universal  Func- 
tion of  organised  matter,"  66 

Memory  of  a  love  cut  short  by 
death,  359,  381 

— Reproduction  and,  59 

— Shocks  and,  60 

— Slipshod,  306 

— The  physics  of,  66 

— Unconscious,  59 

Men  and  Monkeys,  185 

— and  Women,  226 

Men  of  Science,  219 

Mendele Jeff's  Law,  66 

Mendelssohn,  no,  115,  149,  150, 
258,  261 

"  'Men's  work  we  have/  quoth 
one,  'but  we  want  them,' " 
396 

Mental  and  Physical,  69 

— and  Physical  pabulum,  81 

Mental  Evolution  in  Animals,  4 

Mental  stomachs,  Our,  310 

—Suffering,  370 

Men,  The  finest,  36 

Meo,  Gaetano,  114 

Mercy,  307,  361 

Meredith,  George,  185,  186 

Merian,   Baron,  364 

Mesopotamia,  288 

Messiah,  22,  114,  116,  173,  259, 
380 

Metaphysics,  266 

Meteorological  Observatory, 
282,  283 

Metsu,  99,  100 

Michael  Angelo,  324 


Michael,  S.,  224 

Microbe  of  knowledge,  204 

Microcosm,  309 

Middleman  of  mind,  364 

Middle  way,  The,  331 

Mieris,  van,  99 

Mikado,  The,  131 

Militant,  374 

Milk,  261,  285 

Milk-Jug,  Flies  in  the,  216 

Milkman,  238 

Millet,  259 

Mills,  Joanna,  364 

Mind,  67,  68,  73 

— and  Matter,  74  et  seq. 

— An  Open,  300 

Minerva,  338 

Miniature,  Painting  with  mop, 

?4 

Minimis,  De,  non  curat  lex, 
209-1 1 

non  curat  veritas,  299 

Minimum,  209,  299 

Minority  and  Majority,  290 

Minus  nothing,  316 

Miracle  of  forming  opinion,  163 

— of  nothings  forming  some- 
thing, 210 

Miracles,  335-7,  340 

"Miraculous  Draught  of 
Fishes,"  276 

Mischief,  Professor  of,  291 

Mischievous  devil,  226 

Misery,  345 

Misrepresentation,      366,      367, 

369 

Missionaries,  335 
Missolonghi,  244 
Mistakes,  Memory  and,  62,  63 
— The  Power  to  Make,  77 
Mistress,  The  Happy,  231 
Misunderstanding,  Human,  229 
Mixo-Lydian  mode,  129 
Mnemosyne,  358 
Model,  The,   and  the  Lay-Fig- 
ure, 136,  137 


Index 


421 


Moderns  and  Ancients,  193 
Modern  Simony,  172 
Modes,  The  ecclesiastical,  129 
Modest   competency,   Vows   of, 

290 

Modification,  Descent  with,  55 
Moliere  and  his  housemaid,  109 
Money,  31,  36,  142,  221,  365 
— an  Art,  277 
— and  technique,  139 
Money  and  the  arts,  171,  172 
— and  words,  95 
— Art  and  Religion,  229 
— Coins  potential,  95 
— difficulty,  371 

doctor,  37 

— easier  made  than  kept,  141 
— Health  and  Reputation,  37 
-Tying  up,  360 
Monkey  and  stick,  49 
Monkeys,  Men  and,  185 
Mont  S.  Michel,  371 
Monte-Carlo,  334 
Monte  Generoso,  270 
Monteverde,  129 
Month  of  heaven  and  month  of 

hell  before  birth,  289 
Montreal,  269,  388 
—A  Psalm  of,  3,  4,  6,  379,  388 
— The  gospel  of,  389 
Montreuil-sur-Mer,  258 
Moon,  The  Cuckoo  and  the,  337 
Moor  Park,  252 
Moorhouse,     William     Sefton, 

311,  312 
Moral  Government  before  man, 

48 

—guilt,  366 
— influence,  81 
Moral  Merit,  366 
— Responsibility,  317 
— Try-Your-Strengths,  184 
Morality,  358 

— Absolute,  is  stagnation,  176 
— and  pleasure,  29 
— Elementary,  24  et  seq. 


Morality,  its  foundation  and  su- 
perstructure, 24 

— The  Christian,  25 

Morell,  Dr.,  Handel  and,  115 

Mores,  29 

Moritz,  St.,  260 

Moses,  224 

Moszkowski,  132 

Mother,  My  son's,  366 

Mother's  maid,  My  books',  366 

Motion,  74,  76 

Mountain,  336 

Mount,  God's,  341 

Mouse-Ideas,  Cat-Ideas  and, 
216 

Mouse  in  the  Milk-Jug,  216 

Mozart,  HI,  123,  126,  132,  252 

M.S.,  My,  184,  187 

Mudie,  Mr.,  202 

Miiller,  263 

Multitude,  84,  310 

Murder,  268,  269,  292,  317 

Murray,  Mr.  John,  10 

Museum.     See  British  Museum 

— of  Natural  History,  Mont- 
real, 388 

Music,  4,   ii,   107,   no  et  seq., 

129,  357,  392,  398 
— Borrowing  or   appropriating, 

299 

— Chapters  in,  130,  131 
— Difficulties  in,  102 
— Emotion,  not  notes,  96 
— Handel  and,  no  et  seq. 
— How   to   know   whether   you 

are  enjoying,  209 
— On    Borrowing    in,     123    et 

seq. 
— Pictures  and  Books,  On  the 

making  of,  93  et  seq. 
— Rules  for,  96,  97 
— Untuning  or  entuning  the  sky, 

165 

— useless,  173 
—Writing,  372 
Musical  Criticism,  123,  130 


422 


Index 


Musician,  Only  a  professional, 
unable  to  understand  Handel, 

"5 

Mustard-seed,  336 
Mutton  and  sheep,  279 
My  work,  374-8 
Myself,  183 

— a  disappointing  person,  158 
Myself  and  my  books,    158   et 

seq.,  366 

— and  my  publishers,  166 
— and  "Unconscious   Humour," 

166 

— in  Dowie's  Shop,  240 
— in  love  with  beautiful  young 

lady,  284 
— My     grandfather     and,     172, 

173 

— Nausicaa  and,  193 

— no  special  ability,  no  connec- 
tions, 369 

— Triibner  and,  155  et  seq. 

— unpopular,  372 

Mythology,  The  Christian,  348 

Narcissus,  5,  112,  131,  176,  371, 

377,  380,  392,  398 
National  Gallery,  243,  256 
— Portrait  Gallery,  5 
Natural  Selection,  289 
Nature,  235 
— Beauties  of,  270 
— does  not  run  smooth,  143 
— evasive,  226 

— like  Herbert  Spencer,  138 
— mediocre,  12 
— Putting     salt     on     her    tail, 

137 

— Sketching  from,  137 
— Studying  from,  136 
— Truths  from,  138 
—Touch  of,  185 
—The  Unity  of,  88,  89 
— The  Works  of,  220 
Nature's     Double     Falsehood, 

301 


Nausicaa,  194 

— and  Myself,  193 

Nay,  295 

Necessity,  72,  315,  321,  322 

— Free-will  and,  316  et  seq. 

Neglect,  366,  367 

Negri,  Cavaliere  Avvocato,  270, 

350 

Nelson,  199 
Neptune   (the  god),  254;    (the 

planet),  313 
Nero,  365 
Nerves,  79 
— and  Postmen,  85 
New  Ideas,  106 
New  Quarterly,  7,  251 
New  Testament,  338,  339 
New  Zealand,  i,  8,  21,  39,  63, 

99,   213,   250,   268,   270,   271, 

283 

Newland's  Law,  66 
Newman,  Cardinal,  186,  187 
Newspapers,  291,  292 
Newton,  Sir  Isaac,  344,  345 
Nice  people,  391 
Nicholas  Nickleby,  Telemachus 

and,  193 
Night,  315 

Shirts  and  Babies,  85,  86 

Nihilism,  219 

Nihilo,  Ex,  nihil  fit,  312,  314 

Nile,  The  Battle  of  the,  278 

Niobean  folds,  269 

Noise,  Making,  373 

Non-Ego,  Ego  and,  321 

Non-living  and  living,  71 

Non  Omnis  Moriar,  355 

Nonsense,  72,  75,  328 

— Humanitarian,  119 

Norman  fisherman,  36 

"Not   on    sad    Stygian   shore," 

397 

Note-Books  of  Samuel  Butler, 
The,  Extracts  from,  in  the 
New  Quarterly  Review,  7 

Notes,  363 


Index 


423 


Notes,  an  author  the  worst  per- 
son to  edit  or  even  to  write 
his  own,  215 

— Making,  100,  101 

—These,  261 

Nothing,  310,  312,  314,  316 

Notoriety,  373 

Nuremberg,  258 

Obliteration  of  the  Past,  293 

Obscurity,  366,  367 

— after  death,  291 

Observation,  363 

"O    Critics,    cultured    Critics!" 

39i 

Occasions  Supreme,  268,  269 
Octogenarian,  354 
Ode  for  S.  Cecilia's  Day,  165 
"Odour  of  defencefulness,"  390 
Odyssey,    The,    5,    173,    192-9, 

254,    277,    302,    369,    376-8, 

380 

— Homer's,  32 
— Rendered  into  English  Prose, 

The,  6,  369 

— The,  and  a  Tomb  at  Carcas- 
sonne, 198 

— The,  Bunyan  and,  191 
— The,  a  corpse  to  all  who  need 

Lang's  translation,  197 
— The,    written    by    a    woman, 

198 

Offers  of  Marriage,  227 
Oil  and  Water,  210 
Old  age,  66 
Old    Masters,    The,    and    their 

pupils,  135 

Olympus,  Mount,  345 
Omission  in  art,  97,  100,  101 
Omnibus,    Studying    faces    in, 

137 
Omnipresence    of    Intelligence, 

77. 

Omnium  gatherum,   10 

On  the  Making  of  Music,  Pic- 
tures and  Books,  93  et  seq. 


Oneself,  357 

Opera,  At  the,  131 

— Grand,  131 

— Italian,  131 

Opinion,  335 

— and  matter,  80 

— heredity  or  post-natal,  321 

— Public,  1 08,  261 

Opinion,  The  Art  of  propagat- 
ing, 164 

Opinions  kept  in  the  back- 
ground, 294,  295 

Oppenheims,  239 

Opposite,  Its,  lurks  in  every- 
thing, 58,  59 

Opposites,  76,  297 

Oracle  in  Erewhon,  26 

Orchestra,  The  world  an,  134 

Orchid,  305 

Organic  and  inorganic,  19,  77- 
80 

Organism,  Our,  86 

Organs  and  Makeshifts,  20 

— and  tools,  Analogies  between, 

375 

—Our,  321,  336 
Origin  of  Life,  48 
Origin  of  Species,  The,  i,  8,  39- 

41 
Originality,  292 

"Origine    Siciliana    dell'    Odis- 

sea,"  5 
Oropa,  282 
Orphan,  A  born,  33 
Orthodoxy,  The  Irreligion   of, 

350 

Othello,  Providence  and,  223 
Ourselves  and  the  Clergy,  351 
"Out,  out  into  the  night," 

393 

Ova,  spermatozoa  and  embryos 
think  almost  identically,  16 

Over-work,  26 

Ovum,  Impregnate,  54 

"Owen  John  Pickard"  (pseudo- 
nym), 2 


424 


Index 


"Owen  William  Bickersteth," 
his  supposed  brother,  2 

Owl,  Stuffed,  388 

Oxford  and  Cambridge,  222 

Oxygen,  77 

Oyster,  Who  would  want  to 
kiss  an?  205 

Pabulum,  Mental  and  physical, 
81 

Padua,  Ilium  and,  195 

Pagani's  Restaurant,  7,  8 

Pain,  345,  366 

— felt  by  another,  295 

Painter,  The,  an  artist,  not 
merely  a  mirror,  143 

Painter,  The  Moral,  235 

Painter,  The  young,  puzzling 
him,  140 

Painter's,  A,  Views  on  Paint- 
ing, 135  et  seq. 

Painting,  107 

— A  Painter's  Views  on,  135 
et  seq. 

— an  epitomising  of  nature, 
141 

— and  Association,  138 

— emotion,  not  forms  or  col- 
ours, 96 

Painting,  useless,  173 

Palestine,  The  Return  of  the 
Jews  to,  239 

Palestrina,  113 

Pall  Mall  Magazine,  236 

Pall  Mall  Gazette,  The  Homeric 
Deity  and  the,  33 

Pancras,  St.,  bells,  246 

Pandora,    170 

Pangenesis,  70 

Pantomime,  260 

Pants,  389 

Parables,  The,  350 

Paracca,  Giovanni  Antonio,  376, 
378 

Paralysis  (Handel),  113,  (Ma- 
dame Patey),  114 


Parrots,  259 

Parry,  John,  255 

Parsee,  A  patient,  255 

Parsifal,  123 

Past,  Future  and,  220 

— Society  for  Burial  of  the, 
180 

Pater,  Walter,  184 

Patey,  Madame,  113,  114,  263 

"Patiently,"  290 

Paul,  S.,  190,  316,  325 

Pauli,  Charles  Paine,  2,  3,  6 

Paul's,  St.,  70,  199,  267 

Pea  in  boot,  349 

Peace  at  the  last,  361 

— The,  that  passeth  understand- 
ing, 338 

Pear's  Soap,  209 

Peas,  Shelling,  343 

Pecksniff,  393 

Peculiar  People,  The,  337 

Pedals  or  drones,  225 

People,  Nice,  391 

— The  Peculiar,  337 

Permanent  Success,  Ephemeral 
and,  180  et  seq. 

Persecution,   82 

Perseus  and  Andromeda,  225 

— and  St.  George,  222 

Persistence,  315 

Person,  Myself  a  Disappoint- 
ing, 158 

Personal  Identity,  60,  375 

Personality,  Double,  235 

— The,  of  the  Author,  107 

Personified  Science,  339 

Peterborough,  250,  251 

Petrie,  Mr.  Flinders,  370 

Pharisaism,  201 

Philharmonic  Concert,  At  a, 
132 

Philippians,  162 

Phillips,  Mr.,  343 

"Philosophic  Dialogue  on  the 
Origin  of  Species,"  i,  39-41 

Philosophic  mind,  A  truly,  46 


Philosopher,  The,  169 

Philosopher's  Stone,  358 

Philosophies,  God  and,  328 

Philosophy,  327 

— Common  Sense  and,  330 

— Logic  and,  329 

"Philosophy  of  the  Uncon- 
scious," 3 

Photographed,  Why  a  lady  gets, 
163 

Photographer  in  every  bush, 
214 

Photographer's  nature,  214 

Photographs  at  Herculaneum, 
230 

— of  people  in  shop-windows, 
206 

Photography,  4 

Phrygian  mode,   129 

Physical  and  Spiritual,  96 

— Excellence,  26 

— Mental  and,  69 

— pabulum,  Mental  and,  81 

Piano-playing  unconsciously,  53 

—Well-tuned,  300 

Piccolomini,  282 

Pickwick,  Mr.,  Hamlet,  Don 
Quixote  and,  217 

Picture,  396 

Pictures,  357 

Pictures,  On  the  making  of  Mu- 
sic, Books  and,  93  et  seq. 

— Rules  for,  96,  97 

Pienza,  282,  283 

Pigs,  252 

Pilate,  307 

Pilgrim's  Progress,  The,  188  et 
seq.,  193,  202 

Pinturicchio,  275 

Piora,  272,  273 

Pipe,  Tobacco,  47 

Pitt  Press,  385 

Planets,  313 

Plants,  Introduction  of  Foreign, 
281 

Plants,  understanding,  77 


425 


Plato,  150,  186 

Platt,  Mr.  Arthur,  195,  377 

Play,  396 

Pleasure,  345 

— Morality  and,  29 

Pleasure,    On    Knowing    What 

Gives,  154,  207-9,  331 
—With,   ii 8 
Plot,  131 
Plover,  305,  306 
Plus  nothing,  316 
Podging,  264 
Poem,    A    rhymed,    should    not 

exceed    a    sonnet    in    length, 

192 

Poems,  379  et  seq. 
Poetry,  192,   193,  266 
— better  kept  short,  197 
Poets,  The,  225 
Poggibonsi,  275,  276 
Pogni,  Ulisse,  275 
Poins,  178 

Point,  Gaining  one's,  348 
Points  of  View,  Two,  297 
Pollaiuolo,  School  of,  146 
Pomposities  of  virtue,  28 
Pontifex,     Alethea     and    Miss 

Savage,  2 
— Ernest,  115 
Poor,  306  316 
Pope,  The,  260 
Populus  Vult,  184 
Porpoise,  The  Contented,  231 
Portland  Road,  251 
Portraits,  107 
Portraits  of  S.  Butler,  3,  5 
Position,  The,  of  a  Homo  Unius 

Libri,  155  et  seq. 
Possessing  one's  soul  in  peace, 

361 

Post  Office,  286 
— in  Rome,  262 
Postmen,  nerves  and,  85 
Posterity,  362 
Posthumous  Honours,  367 
—Life,  360,  363 


426 


Index 


Posthumous  Recognition,  367 
Pot-boiler,  The  Complete,  230 
Potato-shoot,  54 
Poverty,  225,  315 
Power,  Knowledge  is,  102 
— Literary,  108 
— to  make  mistakes,  77 
Praise,  397 
Prayer,  212-14 
— The  Lord's  349 
"Prayer,"   A,   395 
Prayer-book,  251 
Prayers,  Family,  2,  230 
— How  I  shed  mine,  213 
Praying  for  rain,  326 
Preachers,  Street,  222 
Preface  to  Vol.  II    (of  Note- 
Books),    215 
Pre-lethal  life,  363 
Preparation  for  death,  362 
Prescription,    Eating    doctor's, 

3" 

Press,  The,  N.Z.,  i,  2,  8,  39-41 
Pretending  to  know  things  one 

does  not,  stupid,  209 
Priest  and  his  breviary,  136 
Priests,  38,  334 
"Priests'  Bargain,"  The,  236 
Priests  of  art,  124 
Priggishness,  35 
Prigs,  35 

Prigs  and  Blackguards,  230 
Primitive     Methodist     Chapel, 

341 

Prince,  Jones's  cat,  153 
Principles,    First,   309    et   seq., 

330,  331 
Probate,  339 
Procreation,  Wilful,  289 
Profane   Statues,    Sacred   and, 

139 
Professionals,    Amateurs    and, 

MS 

Programme,  Descriptive,  380 
Progress,  a  desire  to  live  beyond 

one's  income,  12 


Projected  sequel  to  Alps  and 
Sanctuaries,  Material  for  a, 
259  et  seq. 

Promontogno,  264 

Prophets,  Gods  and,  333 

Prophets,  stoning  them,  157, 
201 

Property,  309 

Proposing,  The  art  of,  289 

Prose,  193,  264 

— Poetical,    197 

— Translations  from  verse  into, 
197 

Proselyte,  82 

Proselytising,  eating  and,  81 

Protoplasm,  58 

— and  Reproduction,  69 

— Viscid,  69,  70 

Providence,  322 

— and  Improvidence,  223 

— and  Othello,  223 

— Genius  and,  180 

— Tempting,  99 

Proverbi  Toscani,  379 

Proverbs,  The,  201,  203 

Psalmist,  The,  27,  212 

"Psalm  of  Montreal,"  A,  3,  4, 
6,  379,  388 

Psalm,  A  penitential,  230 

Psalms,  The,  202 

Public,  Catering  for  the,  372 

— ear,  The,  162 

— Handel  and  the  British,   113 

— Hoodwinking  the,  162 

—life,  367 

— My,  a  declining  one,  369 

— opinion,  108,  261 

— Wooing  the,  371 

Publisher,  364 

Publishers'  antechambers  dis- 
tasteful, 373 

Publishers,  Myself  and  my,  166 

Publishing  at  my  own  risk,  373 

Pulling  strings,  396 

Punch,  208 

Punishment,  343 


Index 


427 


Punishments,  Rewards  and,  362 

Pupils,  173 

Pupils,    The    old    masters    and 

their,  135 

Purcell,  122,  127,  128,  188 
Purgatory,  219 
Purse,  Atrophy  of  the,  231 
Purses,  Things  and,  224 
Puzzled  atoms,  84 
Puzzled  to  death,  206 

Quails,  307 

Quarrelling,  The  art  of,  229 

Queen,  The,  316 

— of  Heaven,  The,  334 

Quick  people,  294 

Quick,  The,  and  the  dead,  279 

Quickly,  Mrs.,  264 

Quickness    in  seeing,   139 

"Quis  Desiderio ?"  166 

Quixote,     Don,     Hamlet,     Mr. 
Pickwick  and,  217 

Raccolta  di  Proverbi   Toscani, 

379 
Race,  The,  and  the  individual, 

15 

Rachel,  Madame,  184 
Raffaelle,  256,  257,  324 
— the  Ansidei,  145  et  seq. 
Railway,  Line  of,  The  last  six 

inches  of  a,  380 
Rain,  326 
Rain-drops  of  new  experience, 

62 

Rain,  Handel's  shower  of,  120 
Rakaia,  288 

"Ramblings  in  Cheapside,"  261 
Rangitata,  268,  288 
Rape  of  Lucre ce,  The,  192 
Rapson,  Mr.  E.  J.,  165 
Rarity,  365 
Rassegna  delta  Letteratura  Sici- 

liana,  5 
Rattlesnake,      An     intellectual, 

268 


Ravens,  253 

Reading  aloud  what  I  write, 
109 

Reading  and  Writing,  328 

Real  Blasphemy,  341 

Reason,  315 

— Common  Sense,  and  Faith, 
328 

— and  Faith,  171 

—Faith  and,  333 

Rebelliousness,  332  et  seq. 

Recognition,  Posthumous,  367 

Reconciliation,  346  et  seq. 

"Reconciliation,  A  step  to- 
wards," 8,  376 

Record  Office,  237 

Records  and  Memorials  col- 
lected by  R.  A.  Streatfeild,  6 

Rectory,  334 

Reflection,   344 

Reflex  Action,  90,  344 

Refreshment,  Sense  of,  17 

Regret,  348 

Relative  Importances,  97,  100 

Relative  minor,  226,  260 

Relaxation  of  effort,  17 

Religion,  35,  329,  346,  347 

— Science  and,  36 

— Women  and,  228 

Religious  light,  The  dim,  338 

Rembrandt,  107,  149,  151-3,  173, 
179,  235,  357 

—Buying  a,  151 

Remembering,  63 

Remembrance  after  death,  360, 
361,  367,  369 

Renan,  337 

Rent,  Pay  me  my,  391 

Repentance,  The  Academic  Sys- 
tem and,  135 

Reproduction   ad    infinitum,    54 

— -and  Memory,  59 

— the  discontent  of  the  germs 
inside  the  parents,  16 

Reproduction,  Protoplasm  and, 
69 


428 


Index 


Reproductive  system,  68 
Reputation,  217,  370,  372 
—A  lasting,  155 
— Cheap,  247 
— Money  and  Health,  37 
— Shade,  Colour  and,  138 
Requiem,  Mozart's,  123 
Reserve    between   parents    and 

children,  31 

Responsibility,  Moral,  317 
Rest,  17,  31 5 
Resurrection,  324 
Resurrection    of   Jesus    Christ, 

The  Evidence  for  the,  2,  6 
Retirement,  371,  372 
Retribution,    Forgiveness    and, 

349 

Return  of  the  Jews  to  Pales- 
tine, 239 

Revenge,  Gratitude  and,  340-1 

Reversion,  My,  4,  61 

— Selling  a,  229 

Reversion  to  ancestors,  66 

Reviewers,  156,  196 

Reward,  Ten  shillings,  341 

Rewards  and  punishments, 
362 

Rhodes,  Cecil,  367 

Rhythm  and  memory,  58 

Rhythms,  68,  71,  73 

Riches,  315 

Rickmansworth,  252 

Rift,  The  little,  within  the  lute, 
16 

"Righteous  Man,"  The,  304,  316, 

38o>  390 

Righteousness,  200  et  seq. 
River  of  Death,  358 

Memory,  358 

Robbery,  309 
Roberts,  Mr.  Arthur,  132 
Robinson  Crusoe,  202 
Rockstro,  W.  S.,  5,  128,  250-2 
Roman  Catholic,  342 
Roman  Emperor,  The,  213 
Roman  Emperors,  325 


Roman  Empire,  The,  206, 
207 

Romanes,  G.  J.,  4 

Romans,  The,  200-4,  33$ 

Rome,  262 

— Church  of,  338 

Rosherville  Gardens,  260 

Rothschilds,   52,  239 

Royal  Academy  Exhibition,  3, 
276 

Rubens,  230 

Rudimentary  organs  in  ma- 
chines, 47 

Rules  for  making  Literature, 
Music  and  Pictures,  96,  97 

— for  tuning  the  harpsichord, 
Handel's,  128 

—of  Life,  The,  n,  351,  352 

Run  smooth,  Nature  does  not, 
193 

Sacer,  The  Vates,  363-5 
Sack  of  Khartoum,  244 
Sacred  and  Profane  Statues, 

139 

Sacro  Monte,  Varallo-Sesia,  5 

Varese,  198,  260 

Sailor,  311 

— Archdeacon  Farrar  not  an  ex- 
cellent, 213 

— Boy  and  Chickens,  245 

Saints,  211,  212 

Sales  of  my  books,  Analysis  of, 
368,  369 

Salt,  Putting,  on  Nature's  tail, 

'37 

Samson,   180 

"Samuel  Butler,"  an  article  by 
R.  A.  Streatfeild,  in  the 
Monthly  Review,  6 

— an  Obituary  Notice  by  H.  F. 
Jones  in  the  Eagle,  6 

Samuel  Butler:  Author  of  Ere- 
whon,  A  Paper  read  before 
the  British  Association  of 
Homoeopathy,  7 


Index 


429 


Samuel  Butler:  Author  of  Ere- 
ivhon,  A  Paper  read  be- 
fore the  Historical  Society 
of  St.  John's  College,  Cam- 
bridge, 7 

Samuel  Butler,  "Brother,  I  am 
much  pleased  with,"  387 

Samuel  Butler:  Records  and 
Memorials  collected  by  R.  A. 
Streatfeild,  6 

Sanctified  by  Faith,  351 

Sano  di  Pietro,  281 

Sans     souci     of     indifference, 

357 

Santa  Famiglia,  A,  with  clothes 
drying,  86 

"Santo  Diavolo,"  274 

Satan,  251 

Saul,  65,  133 

Saul  in  the  cave,  214 

Sausages,  120,  269 

Savage,  Miss  Eliza  Mary  Ann, 
2,  4 

Savoyard,  A  melancholy,  88 

Saxony,  128 

Scaffolding,  Words  a,  94 

Scarlatti  Domenico,  in,  112, 
126 

Scarlet  fever,  64 

Scartazzini,    Signor,  266 

Scheria,  5,  350,  370 

Schliemann,  370 

Schoolmasters,   Earnest,   230 

Schubert,  133 

Schumann,  209 

Science,  159,  324,  329,  333 

— and  Business,  217 

— and  Religion,  36 

— and  Theology,  340 

— Men  of,  219 

— Personified,  339 

—The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Lit- 
erature and,  183 

Scientific  Terminology,  218 

Scientists  and  Drapers,  218 

Scotchman  at  Boulogne,  252 


Scott,  Mr.  R.  R,  Master  of  St. 
John's  College,  Cambridge, 

7 

Scylla  and  Charybdis,  326,  327 

Scylla's  cave  of  scientific  ter- 
minology, 218 

Sea-sick,  254,  255 

Sea-sickness,  82 

"Searcher  of  Souls,  you  who  in 
heaven  abide,"  395 

Secular  thinking,  163 

Seed,  363 

Seeds,  361 

Seeing,  139 

— colour,  141  et  seq. 

— Painting  depends  on,  139 

— Quickness  in,  139 

Segni,  273 

Seigel's  Syrup,  Mother,  296 

Self,  85 

Self-confidence,  225 

Self-indulgence,  Intellectual,  27 

Selfishness,  348,  349 

Selections  from  Previous W orks, 
etc.,  4,  368,  380 

Selinunte,  194 

Sells,  What,  a  book,  161 

Senate  House,  385 

Sensations,  60 

Sense,  331 

— of  need,  My  reviewers',  196 

— of  Touch,  The,  230 

— The  Voice  of  Common,  348 

Senses,  The  link  between  mat- 
ter and  mind,  86 

Sensible  Men,  228 

Sensitiveness  to  newspapers, 
291 

Sentiment,  329 

Separation,  228 

— Judicious,  230 

— of  relations,  32 

— Union  and,  83 

Sequel  to  Alps  and  Sanctuaries, 
Material  for  a  Projected,  259 
et  seq. 


430 


Index 


Seriously,  Taking  life  and  death 

too,  357 
Sermon  preached  by  two  people, 

296 
Sermons,  Unprofessional,  200  et 

seq. 

Serpent,  A  single,  84 
Serpentine,    Ducks   on   the,   63 
Servants,  89 
Sesia,  Val,  280 
Settlement  in  the  steps  of  the 

Union  Bank,  87 
Seven  Sonnets  and  a  Psalm  of 

Montreal,  6,  380 
Sex,  226 

Sexual  Matters,  30 
Shade,  Colour  and  Reputation, 

138 

— Light  and,  140 

Shadows,  Our  ideas,  94,  95 

Shakespeare,  13,  14,  28,  30,  107, 
114,  156,  161,  174,  178,  179, 
192,  342,  343.  357,  363,  378, 397 

Shakespeare,    Handel   and,    114 

— My  Father  and,  183 

Shakespeare's  Sonnets  Recon- 
sidered, 6,  369,  377,  382,  383 

Shakespearean  Words,  268,  269 

Sham  Art  and  Great  Art,  137 

Shan  States,  381 

Sharp,  Virtue  tunes  herself,  27 

Shaw,  Mr.  George  Bernard,  7 

She-bear,  390 

Shepherdness,  China  with  lamb, 
230 

Shepherds,  23,  398 

Shield  of  Achilles,  The,  379,  385 

Shocks,  60 

Shopkeeper,  The  Artist  and  the, 
169 

Shoolbred's,  218 

Shortening,  101 

"Should  Riches  mate  with 
Love?"  176 

Shrewsbury,  I,  3,  5,  342,  343 

Sicilian  Origin  of  the  Odyssey,  5 


Sicily,  5,  7,  273,  274 

Sickness,  82 

Siddons,  Mrs.  270 

Siena,  281 

— and  S.   Gimignano,  274-6 

Silenus,  230 

Silvio,  264-7 

Similarity,  55 

Simony,  Modern,  172 

Simplification,  97 

Simpson,  198 

Sin,  395 

— A  Mountain,  29 

Sinai,  307 

Sincerity,  154,  340 

— a  low  virtue,  162 

Singapore,  381 

Sins,  My  secret,  395 

— that  are  worth  committing, 
II 

Sisto,  Madonna  di  S.,  257 

Sisyphus,  344,  355 

Sitting  quiet  after  eating,  82 

Sixpence,  The  Jubilee,  136 

Skeleton  in  Cupboard,  315 

Sketch-Books,  Literary,  237 

Sketches,  Written,  237  et  seq. 

Sketching  from  nature,  137 

Skin,  dropping  off,  88,  89 

— of  one's  teeth,  169 

Slade,  Mr.,  288 

Sleep  and  death,  25 

Sleeper,  396 

Sleeping  Beauties,  116 

Slipshod  thinkers,  350 

Small  things,  308 

Smalley,  Mr.,  Rector  of  Bays- 
water,  no 

Smith,  386 

— and  the  Rangitata,  268 

— Mrs.,  316 

Snails,  slugs  and  superstitions, 
n 

Snakes,  Poisonous,  392 

Snap-shots,  372 

Snap-shotting  a  bishop,  254 


Index 


Snap-shotting  Archdeacon  Far- 
rar,  213 

Snipe,  226 

So-and-so,  Mrs.,  347 

Societies,  The  Learned,  moult- 
ing yearly  medals,  206 

Society    and    Christianity,    350, 

351 
— for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty 

to  Animals,  206 

— for  the  Suppression  of  Use- 
less Knowledge,  293 
— of  Authors,  373 
Soglio,  264,  265 
Solario,  Andrea,  149 
Solicitor,  Handel  and  a  letter  to 

a,  119 

— The  Family,  392 
— Wound  in  the,  serious,  91 
Solicitors,  37 

Solomon  in  all  his  glory,  224 
— The  Song  of,  201 
"Something,"  63 
Something  out  of  nothing,  57, 

310,  312,  314,  346 
Son  of  Man,  348 
—My,  366 

Songs  without  Words,  no,  149 
Sonnet,    Rhymed   poem    should 

not  exceed  in  length,  192 
Sonnets,  383 
— Shakespeare's,    Reconsidered, 

6,  369,  382,  383 
Sorrow  within  sorrow,  228 
Soul,  76 

Souls  and  Books,  95 
— Transmigration  of,  357,  358 
Sound  and  silence,  328 
Soup,  269 
Source,    The   Great   Unknown, 

352 

South  Sea  Islanders,  207 
Sovereigns  in  the  street,  375-8 
Sparks,  219 
Speaking  voice,  Handel  and  the, 

117 


Specialism      and      Generalism, 

222 

Spectator,  3,  161,  380 
Speculation,  229 
— An  Astronomical,  232 
Spencer,  Herbert,  138,  230 
Spenlow  and  Jorkins,  334 
Spermatozoa,  16,  17 
Spider,  305,  306 
Spiritual,  Physical  and,  96 
— Treadmill,  338 
Spoiled  Tarts,  9 
Spontaneity,  319,  323 
Spontaneous  Generation,  323 
Sports,  16 

Spurgeon,  Mr.,  388,  389 
Squandering,  13 
Squaring  accounts,  160,  161 
— the  account  and  Karma,  15 
Stagnation,  29 
Stars  ahead  of  and  behind  us, 

232,  233 
Starting    again    ad    infinitum, 

361,  362 
Statical,  67,  68 
Statues,    Sacred   and  profane, 

139 

Stead,  Mr.,  190 

Stealing  (Music),  122 

Steamboat,  229 

Steam  Engine,  325 

Steam  Engines,  A  fertile  union 
between  two,  46 

Steps  in  ice,  312 

Sterility  of  hybrids,  66 

Stevens,  Alfred,  199 

Stevenson,  R.  L.,  187 

Still-born  on  reaching  birth, 
361 

Stomach,  82,  310 

— Our  mental,  310 

Stone,  vivo,  279 

Stop,  I  had  better,  378 

—Where  to,  138 

Stories,  Unwritten  articles,  es- 
says, 229 


432 


Index 


"Stowed  away  in  a  Montreal 
lumber-room,"  388 

Strad,  241 

Straightforwardness,  352 

Strand,  The,  237 

Strange  flesh,  30 

Street  preachers,  222 

— The  Man  in  the,  121 

Streatfeild,  Mr.  R.  A.,  6,  7,  8, 
40 

String  and  Knife,  21 

Struldbrugs,  Literary,  229 

Studied  Ambiguity,  290 

Study,  Action  and,  139 

— and  Research,  375 

Studying  from  nature,  136 

Stuff,  68 

Stygian  shore,  397 

Style,  107,  1 86,  187 

Subdivisible  matter,  82 

Subject  and  Treatment,  108 

— Choice  of,  105 

Subjects,  Familiar,  277 

— Titles  and,  229  et  seq. 

Sub-vicious,  25 

Substance,  67-9 

— An  eternal,  unchangeable,  un- 
derlying, 75 

— The  Universal,  67,  68 

Success,  Bored  by,  371 

—Capping  a,   156 

— Ephemeral  and  Permanent, 
1 80  et  seq. 

— Financial,  373 

— My  own,  157 

Successors,  Who  will  be  man's, 

44 

Suffering,  Mental,  370 
Sugar,  178 
Suicide,  232 
Suite  de  Pieces,  101 
Sullivan,   Sir  Arthur,   128,  130 
Summer,  315 
Sun,  309 

Sunday  morning  chapel,  387 
Sunday  Times,  The,  186 


Sunday  Walks,  341 

Supernatural,  The  Church  and 
the,  340 

Super-Organic  Kingdom,  The, 
78 

Superstition,  346 

Superstitions,  Life,  Snails  and 
slugs,  II 

Superstitious  Foundations,  309 

Supply,  315 

Suppressio  Veri,  140 

Supreme  Occasions,  268,  269 

Susanna,  120 

Swede,  An  impulsive,  243 

Swell,  A;  all  round,  36 

Swells,  35 

Swift,  Dean,  191 

Swindling,  341 

Switzerland,  342 

Symbols,  346 

Symphony  for  Part  II  of  Nar- 
cissus, 380,  392 

Sykes,  at  Cambridge,  no 

Tabachetti,  5,  376 

Tabard,  The,  262 

Tabulae  rasse,  357 

— scriptae,  357 

Tadpoles,  55 

Talk,  perhaps  originally  con- 
fined to  scholars,  94 

Tantalus,  343,  344,  355 

Technical  Knowledge,  College 
of,  221 

Technique,  Money  and,  139 

Tedder,  Mr.,  Librarian  of  the 
Athenaeum  Club,  173 

Teeth,  356 

Teetotaller,  361 

Telemachus,  32 

— and  Nicholas  Nickleby,  193 

Teleology,  66 

Temperament,  Equal,  112 

and  Philosophy,  327 

— Mean  tone,  128 

Tempting  Providence,  99 


Index 


433 


Tennyson,   183,    188,   195,  240, 

343 
— would  have  spoiled  Handel's 

music,  115 

Terbourg,  243 

Terminology,    Scientific,   218 

Terseness,  100 

Tersifying,  101 

Test,  A  Literary  man's,  109 

— of  Faith,  360,  361 

Testament,  The  New,  338,  339 

—The  Old,  201 

Testimony,  324 

Thackeray,  178,  188 

That-way-and-it-isn'tness,  226 

The  Enfant  Terrible  of  Litera- 
ture, 183 

The  Germs  of  Erewhon  and  of 
Life  and  Habit,  39-55 

The  Life  after  Death,  Three 
Sonnets,  383,  384,  397,  398 

The  Life  of  the  World  to  Come, 
360  et  seq. 

The  Position  of  a  Homo  Unius 
Libri,  155  et  seq. 

The  Righteous  Man,  304,  380, 
390 

"The  righteous  man  will  rob 
none  but  the  defenceless," 
390 

Thebes,  230 

Theist,  316 

— and  Atheist,  337 

Theodora,  117,  118 

Theodora  and  Susanna,  120 

Theology,  Science  and,  340 

Theories,  Forming  and  discard- 
ing, 377 

"There  doth  great  Handel  live, 
imperious  still,"  397 

Thieves  falling  out,  292 

Things  and  purses,  224 

— Great,  179 

Thinking,  73 

— Secular,  163 

This-way-and-it-isness,  226 


Thomas,  Miss  Bertha,  274 

Thought,  67,  68 

— and  Word,  93 

— without  words,  93 

Thoughts,  My,  216 

Three  hundred  a  year  "deaden- 
ing," 34 

Three-score  years  and  ten  of 
immortality,  14 

Ticinesi,  350 

Tilbrook,  Revd.  S.,  364 

Time,  219 

— and  Life,  Accidents  of,  358 

— heals  wounds,  359 

— past,  present  and  future,  67 

Times,  The,  123,  166,  185,  186, 
223,  237 

Timon  of  Athens  (Purcell's)  122 

Tinkering  a  sonnet,  383 

Tintoretto,  256 

Titian,  135,  152 

Title,  Requisitions  on,  309,  310 

Titles  and  Subjects,  229  et  seq. 

Titus  Andronicus,  156 

Tobacco,  Crumb  of,  251 

—pipe,  47 

— plant,  267 

Tobacconist,  My,  165 

Tom  Jones,  202 

Tom  Jones,  364 

Tonic,  226,  260 

Too  much,  What  is?  103 

Tool,  321 

Tool-box,  1 8,  19,  23,  86,  321 

Tools,  18-20,  22,  232 

— and  Organs,  Analogies  be- 
tween, 375 

Tooth-ache,  370 

Torture  of  Death,  The,  355,  356 

Touch  of  Nature,  One,  185 

— The  Sense  of,  230 

Touches,  Inarticulate,  137 

Trade,  Art  and,  170,  171 

Tragic  Expression,  269,  270 

Trail  and  Writing,  96 

Train  and  Hedge,  21 


434 


Index 


Train  not  moving,  311 
Translating  the  Odyssey,  197 
Translation,  a  dislocation,  198 
— A  (Martin  Chuzzlewit),  393 
— from   an   Unpublished   Work 

of  Herodotus,  379,  384 
Translations,  94 
— from  verse  into  prose,  197 
Transmigration    of    souls,    357, 

358 

Traponese  Origin  of  the  Odys- 
sey, On  the,  5 

Trapani,  5,  199,  376 

— and  Gadshill,  193,  194 

Treadmill,  The  Spiritual,  338 

Treatment,  Subject  and,   108 

Treaty,  Secret  with  oneself, 
209 

Tregaskis,  Mr.,  40 

Trespasses,  340 

Trinity  Hall,  253 

Triumph  of  Time  and  Truth, 
116 

Triibner  and  Myself,  155  et  seq. 

Truisms,  331 

Trumpington  Road,  385 

Trunk,  Packing  our,  100 

Truth,  292,  297-303,  307,  352 

— Absolute,  310 

Pretty  safe  from,  59 

— and  Convenience,  297  et  seq. 

— Guesses  at,  347 

Tellers,  Professional,  222 

Truths  from  nature,  138 

Troad,  The,  5,  283-7 

Trojan  War,  260 

Trouble-saving,  302 

Troy,  370 

Trying  to  Know,  160 

make  myself  like  things, 

209 

Try-your-strengths,  Moral,   184 

Tub,  384 

Tuke,  Mr.  H.  S.,  A^R.A.,  243 

Tune,  It  is  a  wise  tune  that 
knows  its  own  father,  122 


Tuning  Death  flatter,  358 

— Handel's  Rules  for,  128 

— Virtue  sharp,  27 

Turk,  The,  and  marriage,  285 

Turnpikes,  342 

Twelve  Voluntaries  and  Fugues 

by  the  celebrated  Mr.  Handel, 

128 

Two  Deans,  The,  379,  387 
Two     Incomprehensibles,     323, 

324 

Two  Writers,  235 
Tylor,  Mr.  Alfred,  158 
Tyndall,  232 
Types    of   humanity,    rich   and 

poor,  51,  52 
"Tyrants    now    no    more    shall 

dread,"  118 

Ulysses,  6,  122,  377 

Ulysses,  32,  194,  195,  199,  335 

— and  Penelope,  198 

Umbrella,  51 

Unburying  Cities,  370 

Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  265 

Unconscious,  The  Philosophy 
of  the,  3 

— Theory  of  the,  59 

— action,  53  et  seq. 

— association,  65 

— humour  and  Dickens,  32 

Myself  and,  166 

— memory,  59 

Unconscious  Memory,  3,  7,  8, 
39,  42,  66,  368,  375 

Understanding,  73 

— The  peace  that  passeth,  338 

Undertakings,  Abandoned,  96 

Unimaginative,  The,  are  as  chil- 
dren, 307 

Union  and  Separation,  83 

—Bank,  The,  87,  88 

Unity,  310 

— and  multitude,  84 

—of  nature,  The,  88,  89 

Universe,  The,  314 


Index 


435 


Universe,    The,    the   only   true 

atom,  84 
Universal  Review,  5,  6,  166,  181, 

261,  369,  376 
Universal   substance,    The,    67, 

68 

Universities,  292,  293,  335 
University  Calendar,  292 
Unknown,  God  and  the,  324-6 
Unlucky,  Lucky  and,  220 
Unorthodox,  374 
Unpopular,  Myself,  372 
Unprofessional  Sermons,  200  et 

seq. 

Unrest,  315 
Unseen  Kingdom,  320 
— World,  n,  168,  320,  347 
Untuning  the  sky,  165 
Unwritten   law,  The,  95 
Usefulness,  Art  and,  173,  174 
Useless  knowledge,  293 

Val  Bregaglia,  264 

— Leventina,  350 

— Sesia,  280 

Valentine,  85 

Values,  290 

Vanity  of  human  wishes,  219 

"Vanquished  slaves,"  119 

Varallo-Sesia,  4,  5,  7,  198,  274, 

280 

Varese,  260 

Vates  Sacer,  The,  363-5 
Veal  and  calf,  279 
Vegetarian,  361 
Velasquez,  153,  179 
Venice,  274 
Venus  and  Adonis,  192 
"Venus     laughing     from     the 

skies,"  117,  118 
Venus,  Transits  of,  232 
"Verdi  prati,"  267 
Veritas,  De  minimis  non  curat, 

299 

Verrocchio,  146 
Verse,  192,  193 


Verse  into  prose,  Translations 

from,  197 

— poetry  and  prose,  193 
Vesuvius,  343 
Viale  at  Pienza,  The,  282 
Vibrations,  58,  66  et  seq. 
Vice,  352 

— and  Virtue,  27,  28 
Vices  of  meanness,  34 
Victims,      man      remains      on 

friendly  terms  with  his,  82 
Vien  Tiane,   381 
View,  Two  points  of,  297 
Views  on  Painting,  A  Painter's, 

135  et  seq. 
Vinci,   Leonardo   da,   257,   376, 

378 

Violin,  325 
: — maker,     Furber     the,     241, 

242 

practising,  270 

Virgil,  150,  183,  361 

Virtue,  25,  352 

— The  meannesses  of,  34 

— The  wages  of,  289 

— Vice  and,  27,  28 

Virtuous  and  Idle  Apprentices, 

326 

— Life,  My,  28,  29 
Viscidity  of  protoplasm,  69,  70 
Viscosity,  58 

Vittorio  Emanuele  II,  270 
Vivisection,  390 
"Vpi  che  sapete,"  252 
Voice  of  Common  Sense,  348 

the  Lord,  348 

Volcano,  The  arctic,  179 

Volition,  73 

Volterra,  276-9 

Vows    of    modest    competency, 

290 

"Vuaitee,"  350 
Vult,  Populus,  184 

Wages,  The,  of  birth,  289 
virtue,  289 


Index 


"Wait  till  the  clouds  roll  by," 
260 

"Waitee,"  Jutland  and,  350 

Waiting  to  be  hired,   194 

Walks  in  the  Regions  of  Sci- 
ence and  Faith,  31 

Walks,  Sunday,  341 

Wallace,  Mr.  A.  R.,  375 

Wandering,  225 

Wanted,  a  Society,  180 

Wants  and  Creeds,  336 

War  against  machines,  46 

Wardour  Street,  229 

Waste,  114 

paper  baskets,  Mental,  216 

Washing-up,  99 

Wasps,  8 1 

Watch,  an  intelligent  creature, 

44 

chain,  286 

— mending  with  pickaxe,  94 
Water,  Channel  for,  348 

colour  drawings,  8 

dipper,  20 

Watson,  Hon.  Mrs.,  32 

Watts,  152 

Way  of  all  Flesh,  The,  6,  7,  115, 

i53»  364,  369.  377 
"Weakness   is   utter,"   316,   390 
Weather,  The,  294 
Weismann  and  the  germ  being 

the  proper  starting-point,   16 
"Welcome,      welcome,     mighty 

King,"  120 

Wellington  (Duke),  199 
— N.Z.,  Bishop  of,  40 
Wespin,  Jean  de,  376 
Westminster  Abbey,  199,  290 
Wetterhorn,    Handel    and    the, 

118 
"We  were  two  lovers  standing 

sadly  by,"  395 
"What    is't    to    live    if   not    to 

pull  the  strings,"  396 
"While  now  without  measure," 

117 


Whistling  Handel,  65 

Whitman,  Walt,  179 

"Who  paints   a  picture,  writes 

a  play  or  book,"  396 
"Why,"  57 
"Why?"  327 
Widow,  391 

Wife  of  Bath,  The,  262 
Wife,  My,  249 
Wilful  procreation,  289 
Will,  Reconstructing,  392 
Wind  Concerts,  At  the,  133 
Window-cleaning,  242 
Winter,  315 

Wisdom,  169,  172,  176,  203,  223 
— and  Foolishness,  168 
— from  the  West,  284 
— Worldly,  290,  291 
"Wise     men     flattering,"     117, 

118 
Wishes,  The  vanity  of  human, 

219 

Wit,  365 

— No  professor  of,  221 
"With  darkness  deep,"  121 
"With    their    vain    mysterious 

art,"  117,  118 
Woman,  226 
Womanish  men,  334 
Woman's  suffrage,  227 
—religion,  334 
Womb,  292 
Women,  226,  227 
— and  religion,  228 
Wood,  Mr.  H.  J.  T.,  7 
Woodsia,  271,  272 
Wooing  the  public,  371 
Word,  Thought  and,  93 
Wordist,  A  great,  144 
Words,  301,  330 
— a  scaffolding,  94 
— and  Colour,  144 

feelings,  79 

ideas,  65 

—juggles,  95 
— like  money,  95 


Index 


437 


Words,  organised  thought,  93 

Wordsworth,  186 

— only  a  poet,  not  a  musician, 
116 

Work,  Ancient,  193 

— and  the  body,  21-3 

— Men's,  396 

—My,  374-8 

— Our,  looking  to  see  where  it 
is  wrong,  140 

— Poetical,  the  less  a  man  cre- 
ates, the  better,  143 

— to  last  must  be  good,  14 

Working  classes,  335 

— Men's  College,  5,  56,  204 

World,   The,  35,  328,  348,  365 

a  gambling  table,  12 

and  genius,  12 

and  the  individual,  12 

governed   by   self-interest, 

12 

not  wise,  12 

of  the  unborn,  16 

pervaded  by  come-and-go, 

14 
spiritual  and  the  physical, 

174 

Unseen,  168,  320,  347 

— This  masks  a  greater,  176 
— to  come,  The  life  of  the,  360 

et  seq. 

Worldly  wisdom,  290,  291 
Worlds,  Imaginary,  232 


Worlds,  Two,  24,  25 

Worms,  398 

Worsley,  Mr.  Reginald  E.,  241, 

242,  250 

Worth  Doing,  369 
Wound  in  the  solicitor,  91 
Wounds,  Scars  of  old,  370,  371 
Wrangling,  331 
Wrath  to  come,  270 
Writer,  247 
—A  young,  363 
Writing   for   a   hundred   years 

hence,  109 
— slowly,  27 
— and  trail,  96 
— unconsciously,  53 
Writs  of  our  thoughts,  320 
Written  sketches,  237  et  seq. 

"X.Y.Z."      (pseudonym),     304, 
380 

Yankee  Handelian,  A,  114 
Yea,  295 

Young,  Advice  to  the,  34 
Young  people,  30 
Youth,  The  gauntlet  of,  108 
Ypres,  The  Two  Barristers  at, 
255-8 

Zeus,  386 

Zoological  Gardens,  243,  254 


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